Human Escalation
OpenFlows is autonomous, but it is deliberately not unsupervised. There are decisions that should always be made by a person, and the system is engineered to hand those to you clearly and reliably. Escalation is a feature, not a failure: it is a controlled stop rather than a crash.
When OpenFlows pulls a human in
A ticket escalates to a human when it genuinely needs a judgment call:
| Reason | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| A security decision | Something touches a security boundary and only a person should judge it. |
| An ambiguous or underspecified requirement | The work is unclear and the team must not guess. |
| An architectural choice | A design direction that needs a human call. |
| A merge block or conflict | A merge conflict or block the team cannot resolve on its own. |
It also escalates after exhausted automatic recovery: if the system has retried a failing ticket a bounded number of times and it is still stuck, it stops retrying and tells you rather than spinning forever.
What happens on escalation
- The ticket is parked - set aside so it doesn't deadlock the rest of the fleet.
- The worker is released back to the pool.
- You get a notification on your configured channels with the ticket, the reason, and direct links to the workspace and the pull request.
Notifications are carefully rate-limited so you never get flooded. If a channel is down, that never breaks the system itself - it just means you check the panel.
How you resolve an escalation
| You can | How the team responds |
|---|---|
| Comment on or close the GitHub issue | The team reacts on its next cycle, reopening or closing the ticket as appropriate. |
| Answer directly in the workspace or chat | Give the agent guidance and it resumes with your direction. |
| Reset the work | Start clean by resetting the stuck work back to the start and letting the team take another pass. |
Why the system can't just approve around you
OpenFlows' whole posture is "when in doubt, don't approve." The gates are structural, so there is no way for an agent to bypass a review or approve without evidence. An unresolved escalation is a dead end until a person or a legitimate reset intervenes.
You are in the loop where your judgment adds value