Never Block on the Human

SkillDev tools

Guides your agent to act on reversible work instead of pausing to ask, reserving confirmations for irreversible steps.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Add ahel to your AI once: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Then ask it to use this.

Then ask your AI: use the Never Block on the Human skill

About this skill

Apply when tempted to ask 'should I do X?' on reversible work. Proceed, present the result, let the human course-correct after the fact; reserve confirmation for irreversible actions.

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by backnotprop/pstack in skills/principle-never-block-on-the-human/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

The human supervises asynchronously. Agents must stay unblocked. Make reasonable decisions, proceed, and let the human course-correct after the fact.

Why: Every permission pause stalls the pipeline and makes the human the bottleneck. Since code changes are reversible and reviewable, a wrong decision usually costs less than blocking.

Pattern:

  • Proceed, then present. Do the work, show the result. Don't ask "should I do X?" Do X, explain why.
  • Reserve questions for genuine ambiguity. Ask only when you cannot infer intent from context.
  • Make the system self-healing. When you notice a problem, log it and fix it in the next round.
  • Supervision is async. Design workflows for review-after-the-fact.

Boundaries:

  • Irreversible actions (force-push, delete production data, send external messages) still require confirmation.
  • Reversible actions (write code, edit notes, split tasks) should proceed without blocking.
  • Product direction comes from the human. Execution should not block.

Signals

GitHub stars
646
Forks
55
Last commit
Sep 2026
Advanced
Item type
skill
Key
principle-never-block-on-the-human-backnotprop
Source
github.com/backnotprop/pstack