Supervision

Supervision patterns govern how agent behavior gets monitored and controlled in production through a combination of human-in-the-loop checkpoints, automated guardrails, escalation policies, and anomaly detection. A supervisor can approve high-risk actions before execution, catch errors before they propagate downstream, and enforce policy constraints on agent behavior, acting as a safety layer between the agent's intentions and the real world. The guiding escalation principle is action reversibility: any action that cannot be undone, such as deleting a file, writing to a production API, or pushing code to a repository, requires explicit human approval before execution, while reversible actions can proceed autonomously with logging.