Agent UX & Human Interaction

Designing for Trust & Calibration

Trust is a calibration target, not a maximization goal: matching user-perceived reliability to measured reliability per task, displaying confidence only where it changes a decision, and spending friction where it actually calibrates.

Approval & Confirmation UX

Consequence-tiered gates, payload-hash pinning so you confirm the action that actually runs, batching and defaults to fight confirmation fatigue, and stronger modalities for genuinely irreversible actions.

Transparency & Explainability

Faithful versus plausible explanations, why a raw chain-of-thought is a persuasive narrative rather than verified causality, choosing the right altitude of explanation, and provenance as the highest-leverage transparency.

Interruption, Steering & Handoff

Responsive non-destructive interruption, distinguishing pause/steer/abort, symmetric handover and handback, shared inspectable state, and reconciling on resume so an agent never silently reverts a human fix.

Progressive Autonomy

The autonomy ladder (operator/collaborator/consultant/approver/observer) as a product surface: autonomy scoped to (capability, scope), promotion gated on a visible track record, and automatic reversible demotion.

Designing for Failure & Recovery

Graceful failure that stops before compounding, undo as the safety net that makes lower friction affordable, actionable error messages, failing closed on consequence and open on capability, and the explicit work of trust repair.