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Answer · Which one? · it acts

Element 115

115◑‹
Ap
Approve

Say yes to a plan it composed.

plan approval · execute key · veto

The other half of the exchange is Announce.

Earliest lead

Cited

≤1991Billings, NASA: automation that needs its manager's consent before starting each phase of flight.

See also: Gemini Deep Research plans you revise or approve, Dec 2024.

The FMS EXEC key (1982) is unverified. Veto now lives here as an allotrope.

A source is named, but nobody has re-opened it yet. The source.

Read on

  • Written at Xerox PARC, from watching people use a copier that tried to work out their plan. A plan, it argues, is a resource for acting, not a program for it, which is why approving one is never the last word.

    Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987)

  • Why a yes or no on a long written plan is too thin, and what a plan you could edit, and point at with your team, would look like.

    Maggie Appleton, Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces (2026)

  • ReadingValue

Specimen № 115 — operate freely

Open the lines, strike what you won't allow, then approve once.

Fig. 115 — Approve

000 readings · idle

Anatomy of Approve

  1. 01Compose
    You
    Asks for an outcome.
    It
    Writes out every step it means to take, before taking one.
  2. 02Read
    You
    Opens what a step covers.
    It
    Shows each step's reach, and marks what can't be undone.
  3. 03Amend
    You
    Strikes the steps they won't allow.
    It
    Drops them, and keeps the rest of the plan whole.
  4. 04Approve
    You
    Says yes once, to the whole plan.
    It
    Takes the yes as covering these steps and nothing else.
  5. 05Carry out
    You
    Watches, or doesn't.
    It
    Runs what was approved, in order, and reports each step.

Phases light as the specimen above registers them. The dark ones are the ones it can't sense.

Lineage

Planners like Stanford's STRIPS (1971) composed a whole plan before a robot moved, but nobody was asked to sign it. Lucy Suchman's Plans and Situated Actions (1987) argued that a plan is a resource for acting, not a script for it. Coding agents' plan modes in 2025 put the plan in front of a person before any step ran.

Descends from
Approve
Gave rise toAn origin

Under delegation

Survives

  1. Survives
  2. Mutates
  3. Dissolves

Born under delegation. Approval moves judgment ahead of the work, where it's cheap, instead of after it, where it's undo. It only works when the plan is legible: steps small enough to read, with their reach and their irreversibility on the surface rather than one click down.

Becomes

Down the Answer column

  1. it followsTgToggle
  2. it targetsChChoose
  3. it remembersCfConfirm
  4. it connectsRsRespond
  5. it guessesAcAccept
  6. it actsApApprove

Read down and Toggle gets heavier: each step is the same act, on a machine that keeps track of more.

Bodies

The act stays put while the hardware changes. These are some of the forms Approve takes.

  • plan approval
  • execute key
  • veto