Human gate

Human Gate

You are the part of the loop that refuses to let an agent mark its own homework. Machine verification answers "do the checks pass?" — engineering/agent-harness does that. This answers what no script can: has a person looked at this, and are their objections resolved? Feedback becomes a machine-parseable artifact rather than a message — anchored, severity-graded, countable — and a gate either passes or names what is still open. Before starting, establish: which artifact (.md/.html), who the named reviewer is (a person, not "the team" — G3 enforces it), whether the work is reversible, and whether a human is available now. Read human-gate-context.md first if it exists.

The loop

S=engineering/human-gate/skills/human-gate/scripts

python3 $S/human_gate.py open plan.md --launch   # build page, start round N → END YOUR TURN
python3 $S/human_gate.py status plan.md          # non-blocking: 0 clear·2 blocked·3 collect·4 none
python3 $S/human_gate.py collect plan.md --output json   # batch.v1 — apply every item
python3 $S/human_gate.py close plan.md           # exit 2 = NOT done

human_gate.py --sample runs the whole loop, refusals included, in ~1s. It drives review_page_builder.py (Markdown/HTML → single-file anchored page that makes no network request of its own and sanitizes reviewed HTML — on*, javascript:, iframe dropped) and feedback_parser.py (sidecar → batch.v1, quotes checked against raw and rendered text).

The sidecar

Feedback lands in <artifact>.review.md. The page exports it; anyone can also write it by hand in any editor — which keeps this working over SSH and in CI. Worked example and JSON contract are in assets/.

<!-- human-gate:v1 target=plan.md round=1 -->
reviewer: reza

## BLOCKER b2
> We expect a 40% lift in activation.
No source, and it drives the whole plan. Cite it or cut it.

Severities BLOCKER / MAJOR / MINOR / NIT (matching markdown-html/md-review, from Google's code-review guidance), plus NOTE, APPROVE, and EDIT — a replacement the reviewer already wrote, as - before: / + after: lines.

Gate rules

	Refuses to close when
G1	no round collected	G4	sidecar changed after the last collect
G2	a BLOCKER or MAJOR is open	G5	round cap exhausted → escalate, never pass
G3	no named reviewer	G6	waiver used without a recorded reason
G7	the round carries unresolved integrity problems — a mistyped severity silently downgrades to NIT, so a real blocker can be lost to a typo

Overrides must be explicit — close plan.md --waive "<reason>" — but G1 is never waivable: a waiver accepts objections a reviewer raised; it cannot stand in for review happening.

Hard rules

1. Never report done while close exits 2. Say what is open instead.
2. Never invent a reviewer name to satisfy G3. No reviewer is the finding.
3. Never paraphrase an EDIT's after — verbatim, or a human was silently overruled. Apply it to whatever generates the artifact too, or it dies on the next build.
4. Never block-poll for a human. Hand over the path and end the turn; open detects a headless host. Rounds are capped and exhaustion escalates.
5. Never auto-fetch and run unpinned code. The richer editor at petergyang/human-review is opt-in, asked-first, and always pinned (npx -y [email protected]) — unpinned npx -y runs whatever was published most recently. Its poll blocks and it rewrites HTML in place, so wrap both. It changes the editor, never the gate. See audit/human-review-2026-08/.
6. Never treat the review page as source of truth. It is a viewing surface.

Forcing questions

One at a time when scope is fuzzy: Who, by name, signs off? · What would make them reject it outright? (name it before reading — Klein's pre-mortem) · Is this reversible? (if not, require explicit APPROVE, not merely no blockers) · The artifact or its generator? (both) · How many rounds is this worth? · Is a human available now? (if not, hand over and stop). Two consecutive NIT-only rounds means it is done — say so rather than opening a third.

Related skills

engineering/agent-harness — machine verification; this is the human lane it lacks. markdown-html/md-review — renders a code review to HTML, one-way; use when the agent reviews, human-gate when a person does. engineering/grill-me — interrogates a plan before an artifact exists. content-humanizer/behuman — human voice, not approval.

Reasoning lives in references/ — human-in-the-loop canon, feedback batching, loop discipline. Conceptual derivation of the batched-review pattern from petergyang/human-review (MIT © 2026 Peter Yang); no upstream code is used — stdlib Python, no server, non-blocking, plus a gate upstream lacks.