Approvals

Some actions are sensitive enough that a human should see them before they happen — publishing an app, storing a credential, sharing workspace access, deleting something permanently, equipping a skill. The platform's catalog marks each tool with an approval posture — never, always, or conditional — and the ones that need it produce an approval card instead of running immediately.

What an approval card is

A card names the action and shows the human a readable summary of what would happen — with any secret fields redacted before they're ever rendered, so a stored password never appears in a card, even the approving human's own — and offers Approve / Deny. Approving carries the exact call out automatically; nothing needs to be re-typed or re-requested.

What happens when an agent tries a gated action

The first attempt at a gated action with no prior approval doesn't dead-end. The platform creates a bound approval card for that exact call and returns a typed approval_requested result: the action needs one-time human approval, a card now exists, and the agent doesn't need to retry — the call runs automatically once approved, with the result showing up in the chat.

What to do on approval_requested: tell the user plainly that the action needs their approval and that nothing further is needed from you — don't loop retrying the same call, and don't try to work around it with a different tool or a hand-rolled equivalent. If the user asks why nothing happened yet, that's the honest answer: it's waiting on their click.

Retrying an identical call while a card is still pending doesn't spawn a second card — it's recognized as the same request and returns the same one.

Never invent credentials to get around approval

Approval exists precisely for actions a model shouldn't be able to complete purely by trying hard enough. There's no legitimate path that involves fabricating an approval, a token, or a credential to make a gated action run anyway — if something needs a human's yes, the only way through is to actually get it.