Harness Engineering Anti-Patterns AP8. Gate Fatigue / Rubber-Stamping 🎯 Point Approval dialogs even for reversible operations, dozens of reflexive "approve" clicks per day. Excessive gates neutralize the gates themselves. ❗ Problem Too many approval requests cause humans to reflexively skip gates. Through the same mechanism as alert fatigue, even truly dangerous irreversible action approvals get rubber-stamped, completely defeating the purpose of gates. 🔍 Mechanism & Symptoms "Human approval on everything" looks safe and reassures auditors, making this anti-pattern organizationally popular. But meaningless approval repetition makes approval reflexive — identical to alert fatigue. If you're asked "may I edit this file?" 50 times a day, the 51st "may I delete the production DB?" gets the same reflexive approval. Symptoms: approval time under 1 second (proof of not reading), all approvals logged as "reviewed" but actually unreviewed, important operation approvals buried among trivial ones, and team complaints about "annoying approvals." 📋 Scenarios - The agent requests approval for every file read. Developers habitually select "allow all," and later reflexively approve when the agent executes a force-push. - Security team mandates "approval required for all operations." Developers process 200 approvals daily and create a script to batch-approve everything. Gates are completely hollow. - In pair programming, every agent edit requires diff preview and approval. Developers mash Enter without reading diffs, and unintended changes slip through. 🛡 How to Avoid - Design permissions around "revocability" not "capability" — freely permit reversible operations - Consolidate only irreversible operations into "heavyweight ceremony" gates, preserving gate scarcity - Measure approval response times — sub-1-second consistently indicates gate decay - Consciously minimize gate count, limiting them to "moments that truly require human judgment" #HarnessEngineering# #AIAgent#