Capabilities

Approvals and oversight

The step a person is still in, and the numbers that say whether their being there means anything.

The flow

An outcome of confirm parks the instruction and returns a challenge. Nothing has moved. A person releases it with the operator credential, and the original instruction settles under its original terms, not under whatever the world looks like an hour later.

CLI

gl approve \
  --intent-id int_8f14e45f \
  --challenge 9c2b71 \
  --mandate mnd_41a0 \
  --rationale "checked the invoice against the quote"

The rationale is required and lands in the record. The audit trail is meant to capture intent, not just the fact that somebody pressed a button.

A separate authority

Operator actions are signed with a different key from the agent's API credential. Holding everything the agent holds does not let you approve anything, which is the property that makes the approval step worth having at all.

Measured, not assumed

Governance that cannot be counted cannot be audited. Five numbers are derived from the signed chain, and each one can be recomputed and refuted by somebody outside.

Review rate: How often a person actually reviewed.
Override rate: How often a person went against the recommendation.
Reversal rate: How often a settlement was later undone.
Enforcement coverage: How much of the chain proves enforcement rather than asserting it. Only entries whose proof actually replayed are counted.
Liability coverage: How much of it names who is responsible.

How much of a person is required

Human involvement is not a switch. It is a posture with a floor above which a person is required, whether they are merely notified, whether unusual cases are escalated even when they are within limits, and whether a person acts alongside the agent rather than after it.

Routing can only tighten. It can turn an allow into a request for confirmation, and it can never turn a refusal into an approval or settle anything itself.

Why the override rate matters most

An approval step that is always approved is not a control, it is a formality with a latency cost. A review rate near one and an override rate near zero together mean nobody is really looking, and that is worth knowing before an incident rather than after one.

Proving a mandate without handing it over

An auditor needs to verify that a mandate exists, what its bounds are, and that it is being respected. Presenting the credential itself also confers the ability to use it, which is over-delegation by construction. The observe path produces a disclosure that answers those three questions and grants nothing, and it replays from its inputs so the reader can refute it.