Approval Gates

An agent asks before implementing a plan and before closing a task — and nothing auto-approves, from the desktop, the status bar, or your phone.

The point of a gate is that an agent stops and asks. 1DevTool puts two of them in the task loop: before the work, and before the task is called done.

The two gates

Plan gate. The agent proposes how it intends to do the task and waits. You read the plan, then Approve or Request changes.

Done gate. The agent says the work is finished and waits. You confirm the task is really done, or send it back.

The review dialog gives the plan a full reading surface — enough width to actually read a plan in. Approve and Request changes are presented as equals, and the feedback box is always open, so writing a correction costs no extra click.

Your words travel to the agent verbatim. Nothing is summarized on the way.

Answering from anywhere

The same verdict can be given from three places, and it reaches the agent wherever it is running:

  • The review queue inside the Tasks workspace
  • A status-bar badge that counts open gates and jumps you to them
  • A page in Remote Control — approve a plan from the kitchen

Nothing auto-approves

If nobody answers in time, the task blocks. It does not proceed on a timeout, because silence is not consent.

Agents wait properly, too: the polling loop an agent uses while waiting for a verdict was measured against Claude, Codex, OpenCode, Grok, and Hermes, so an agent asking for sign-off no longer times out its own request.

Gates and the board

Gates and the board agree with each other:

  • Dropping a card into a column an agent is waiting on opens the approval instead of stepping over it — the move is recorded with your verdict, not behind it.
  • A move that would skip a pending plan or spec review is refused and names what is holding it.
  • Accepting a status an agent already wrote, or starting work that has an open blocker, asks first — those are decisions, not slips.
  • Pulling a task back, or cancelling it, always works without a prompt.

The Needs me view

Needs me in the views rail is the list of everything waiting on a decision from you, across gates and blocked work. Its count is honest: blocked tasks have their own column on the board, so a "Needs me · 2" can no longer point at tasks the board never drew.

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