The approval gate pattern
One pattern, most of the safety
Nearly every automation question that starts with what if it eventually resolves to the same design: put a human between the machine's draft and the world. The machine does the gathering, the writing, the calculating, the ninety percent that is labor. A person does the last step, the approval, the ten percent that is accountability.
Draft-then-approve is the single pattern that makes ambitious automation safe in a small business, which is why it deserves its own field note.
Where the gate goes
The gate belongs wherever an action is expensive to take back:
- Anything leaving the building: emails to customers, quotes, invoices, posts
- Anything moving money: payments, refunds, orders
- Anything deleting or overwriting records that took effort to create
Keep the gate fast
Approval gates die from friction. If reviewing the machine's drafts takes as long as doing the work did, nothing was gained and the gate gets abandoned. The craft is in the presentation: drafts arrive batched at a predictable time, each one shows what it is about to do in one glance, and approving is one action, not a login and four clicks.
Done right, the morning approval pass over a dozen drafts takes five minutes. That is the whole human cost of a system doing hours of work.
Graduating past the gate
Some tasks eventually earn autonomy: weeks of approvals with no edits is evidence. Graduate the routine cases and keep the gate on the exceptions, narrow it, never remove it wholesale. And some gates are permanent on principle, at our shop nothing sends externally without a human, however good the drafts get. The rails around this are in safety rails before speed.
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