What belongs beside the approval button
Reading Eve’s approval documentation left me wondering whether the draft a person reviews is the draft the agent will send.
While you are in a meeting
Suppose an agent has prepared a meeting summary for three people. You read it and think it is ready to send. Another meeting starts, so you leave the approval button for later.
An hour later, the screen still asks, “Send the meeting summary?” In the meantime, someone has edited the draft. The recipient list now includes the whole team. The button has the same label.
Which summary would your “yes” refer to?
Vercel’s agent framework Eve describes defining instructions and tools in a directory and resuming interrupted work. Its documentation on waiting for human approval prompted this scenario. It is a hypothetical, not an incident I experienced or a defect I reproduced in Eve.
Being able to wait is useful. A person does not have to remain at the keyboard. But drafts and recipients can change while that person is away. What they remember on returning is likely to be what they read before leaving.
Is it still the same document?
Eve’s documentation associates an approval request with request and call identifiers and the tool input. Policies can control who may settle it. It also distinguishes submitting a response from the server confirming its resolution.
That gives the work behind the button somewhere to record who answered which request. The part I want to follow further is the document the request points to.
Imagine that the tool input contains only a draft ID. The ID stays the same while its text changes. Keeping that ID does not tell us which sentences the person read. A filename such as “meeting summary” is even less helpful. Yesterday’s file had that name too.
If I were building this feature, I would want to preserve the displayed text and recipients as a fixed draft, then send that revision. If sending instead involves reopening the latest file, matching the approved revision needs to be an execution condition.
This is an application design I am proposing after reading the documentation. I have not established that Eve automatically detects arbitrary changes in external documents, and I have not installed it to test the behavior.
The person need not memorize a long hash. Show them the text and recipients; keep a way to identify that content behind the interface. They did not open the approval screen to do arithmetic.
A typo and one more recipient
Should every edit require another question? That would be too crude. Permission to correct typos differs from permission to send this exact wording to these people.
I would rather preserve the scope of the original delegation. An approval for a particular draft should attach to that draft. A standing instruction to edit and send within defined conditions should operate within those conditions. A button that repeatedly asks about work already delegated soon becomes tiresome.
In our hypothetical summary, changing three recipients to the whole team matters. Even with identical text, the audience has changed. A comparison of the body alone could miss it.
Timing matters as well. If a draft can change between checking its revision and sending it, adding a check still leaves a gap. Using a fixed draft, or enforcing the revision condition together with the action, addresses that gap. The implementation depends on the storage and sending tools involved.
Keep the paper that was read
Paper makes this easier to picture. You can keep the sheet someone stamped, and a new sentence written across it leaves a mark. A file can change very neatly under the same name.
Neatness creates its own small nuisance.
After sending, I would want the approved draft beside the content actually sent, with the delivery result checked separately. Treating an approval record as proof of delivery moves the confusion to the next box in the process.
Back to the screen an hour later. If it still shows the three recipients and the summary you read, there is something to check against your memory. If it now includes the whole team, that difference should appear first.
The approval button can stay small. I would like the paper I read to remain beside it.