Agents · Governance · Approval
Human approval as the boundary for engineering agents
Agents should accelerate research and preparation while accountable people retain authority over public claims, external commitments and spend.
Written by WorldIR · Reviewed by WorldIR Product and Engineering · Updated 26/08/2026
“Human in the loop” is too vague to be an operating rule. The useful question is which actions an agent may take, which evidence must be visible and who has authority to make the resulting commitment.
WorldIR uses a proposal-first boundary. Agents may search, match, normalize, monitor, summarize, reconcile and draft. Those activities reduce tedious work without silently changing the approved engineering state.
Decisions that remain human
A person approves a public profile claim, sends an RFQ, accepts a quote, approves a supplier basket or exports a purchase order. The approval records the actor, fixed revision, selected evidence and time. An API key or model call cannot impersonate that authority.
Deterministic validators narrow the risk
An agent proposal does not enter the identity graph merely because its language sounds confident. Validators check that referenced entities exist, evidence belongs to the authorized scope, catalogue identities are valid and citations came from the supplied result set. Invalid proposals are rejected and remain observable.
Automation can grow without moving the boundary
Organizations may eventually define bounded policies for recurring work, but that should be an explicit authorization with budgets, suppliers and expiry—not an accidental consequence of adding a browser tool. Starting with “propose then approve” lets WorldIR automate the hard preparation while keeping engineering and financial accountability legible.