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AI Agent Glossary

Human-in-the-loop (HITL)

A checkpoint where a person must approve, edit or reject an agent's action before it proceeds.

HITL inserts a human decision into the agent loop — typically before side-effecting actions (deploy, send, pay, delete). It is the most common control in production: LangChain's survey found most teams require human approval for write/delete tools. The design question is where to place checkpoints so that they catch errors without making the agent slower than doing the task manually.

Source: State of Agent Engineering — LangChain

See the numbers behind this term: AI Agent Statistics 2026.