{"slug":"hitl-escape-hatch","href":"/entries/hitl-escape-hatch","api":"/api/v1/entries/hitl-escape-hatch","title":"Human-in-the-loop escape hatch","type":"principle","status":"active","certainty":"reported","claim":"HITL tools give RL-trained agents an explicit ask-human exit when confidence is low, preventing forced low-quality completion of the turn. reported [@vidal2026serious-agentic]","mechanism":"reported [@vidal2026serious-agentic] Models trained to exhaust the turn will produce something. An ask-human tool (explicit in prompt or implicit by availability) is an escape hatch.\n\nFits triage ladders: auto-commit safe / verify-before-prod / co-design / interrupt human. Self-triage is unreliable; defaulting to the comfortable path produces million-token bills.\n\nHITL is a harness permission surface, not a model property.","quantities":[],"limits":"Overuse recreates human attention bottleneck. Underuse recreates reward hacking. Triage policy must be externalized.","inventor_note":"","sources":[{"key":"vidal2026serious-agentic","note":"HITL tools; triage ladder"}],"links":["harness-equals-agent-minus-model","hawk-async-verifier","agentic-alignment-problem"],"relations":[{"slug":"harness-equals-agent-minus-model","rel":"related"},{"slug":"hawk-async-verifier","rel":"related"},{"slug":"agentic-alignment-problem","rel":"related"}],"topics":[{"id":"agentic-engineering","title":"Agentic engineering"}],"created_at":"2026-10-01T19:14:49.307Z","updated_at":"2026-10-01T19:14:49.307Z"}