Approvals

A support agent occasionally needs to send a financial refund. The action requires human approval, but the agent must not block other ticket triage while waiting.

Symptoms

• Side-effecting tool calls run unsupervised and an irreversible action surprises the team.
• Approvals are buried in chat, with no audit trail.
• A single pending approval blocks all of the agent's other work.
• The same approver becomes a bottleneck across many agents.

What Joch does

The Tool Gateway classifies side effects, the Policy Engine decides which calls require approval, and the approval service routes Approval records to the right humans without blocking the agent loop.

Walkthrough

1. Classify the tool

apiVersion: joch.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Tool
metadata: { name: refund.issue }
spec:
  type: rest
  endpoint: { url: "https://billing.example.com/refunds", method: POST }
  sideEffects: { level: financial, idempotent: false, requiresApproval: true }

2. Policy that requires approval

apiVersion: joch.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Policy
metadata: { name: financial-actions-require-approval }
spec:
  appliesTo: { agents: { selector: { matchLabels: { env: prod } } } }
  rules:
    - when: { tool.sideEffect: financial }
      require:
        approval: human
        approvalRouting:
          approvers: [team:billing-leads]
          timeoutMinutes: 60
          onTimeout: deny
        channels:
          - slack:#billing-approvals
          - email:billing-leads@example.com

3. Non-blocking approval

When the agent calls refund.issue, the gateway:

1. Creates an Approval record.
2. Sends the approval to Slack and email.
3. Suspends only the originating tool call — the agent can continue with other work where the SDK allows.
4. Resumes the call when an approver decides, or denies on timeout.

4. Approver experience

joch approvals ls
joch describe approval approval-call-abc123
joch approvals decide approval-call-abc123 --decision approve --rationale "Refund eligibility confirmed."

A web console and Slack / email integrations give the same actions. Decisions are immutable and feed the audit log.

5. Break-glass override

joch approvals override approval-call-abc123 --decision approve --grant-by sre-oncall \
  --reason "Outage: payment system down; refunds queued; manually granting."

Overrides are bounded, logged, and require a separate role — they cannot be invoked from within the agent or its SDK.

Resources involved

• Approval
• ToolCall, Tool
• Policy

Outcome

Risky actions are auditable, routed to the right humans, and bounded by timeout. Approvers operate from a single queue across all agents. Agents do not stall the rest of their work waiting for one decision.