Approvals & audit
Irreversible and outbound actions stop and wait for a person. Everything that happened is written down in plain language, on your machine.
Overview
What this covers
What pauses in the approval queue, how to review and decide, what the audit trail records, and how to use it when someone asks what happened.
How it works
How it works
The approval policy names the actions a person must sign off — typically sending, spending, deleting and signing. When a routine reaches one, it stops there and queues the exact action with its inputs, then carries on with anything that does not depend on it.
The audit trail records, per run: the restated scope, the sources read, the actions taken, the items queued, the decisions made and the final result. It is written in reviewable language and stays on the PC you run Harness on.
This holds when the routine runs overnight. A scheduled run cannot approve its own sensitive step.
Step by step
Step by step
- Open the approval queue.
- Read the queued action and the exact inputs it would use.
- Approve it, or reject it with a short note saying why.
- The routine continues from that point, or stops if the step was essential.
- Open the audit trail for the run and read it top to bottom.
- Adjust the approval policy if the same safe action keeps stopping.
Common problems
Common problems
- The routine idles for days. Nobody checked the queue. Give one named person the job and a time of day to do it.
- The approver is away. Name a second approver before you need one, not after.
- A rejection left half a result. Re-run the routine rather than patching the output by hand — that way the audit trail matches reality.
- Everything stops for approval. The policy is too wide. Narrow it to actions that genuinely cannot be undone.
Related
Where task content actually goes
The one place work leaves your machine is the AI provider you connected.