AI agent glossary
Approval fatigue
What happens when an agent asks for approval so often that people stop reading the requests and click yes by reflex.
Approvals only protect you if someone actually reads them. When an agent asks before every file edit and every command, the requests become noise, and within days people approve without looking. At that point the approval step gives false confidence instead of safety.
The fix is to spend human attention only where it matters. Let safe, reversible actions run automatically, block actions that should never happen, and reserve approvals for the few that are costly, public, or irreversible.
Make each remaining request easy to judge: say exactly what will happen, to what, and why, and show the details a reviewer needs to say no.
A team that approved every shell command switches to auto-approving tests and linters and asking only before pushes, deletions, and network calls. Approvals drop from hundreds a day to a handful that people read.
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