Picture the human at the end of an agent pipeline.
The agent drafts an action. A modal pops up. Approve or reject. The human has seen forty of these today, they all looked fine, and the queue is backing up. They click approve. They will click approve on the next one too.
That is "human-in-the-loop." It is on almost every agentic-AI architecture diagram, usually drawn as a small person icon standing between the model and the irreversible action, labelled governance.
It is not governance. It is a rubber stamp with a person's name on it, and its main function is to move liability from the system to the human who clicked. I want to argue that most HITL, as shipped, makes systems look accountable while making them slightly less safe, and then describe what actually works instead, with code you can adapt.
No prior background assumed beyond having built or used an agent that takes actions.
