Approval gates

A stage can carry a gate. A card arriving there stops, and waits for a person.

Setting one

A gate is a property of a stage: set its gate to approval in board settings. Every card entering that stage opens a gate; no card leaves it without a decision.

The three answers

decision	what happens
approve	the card advances to the next stage
request changes	the card goes back for more work
reject	the card is finished, unapproved

Each is recorded with who decided, when, and any comment they left. That record is part of the card’s history, not a transient notification.

The rule that makes a gate mean something

Whoever produced the work cannot resolve its gate. kaambaan refuses it:

the producer cannot resolve their own gate

The same rule applies to questions: the agent that asked cannot answer its own question.

Without this a gate is decoration — an agent could submit for review and immediately approve itself. With it, a gate is a genuine second party, which is the only reason to have one.

Answering from somewhere else

A gate does not have to be answered in the board. If kaambaan is linked to an AgentPod fleet, a pending gate can be projected into a Matrix room and answered there — from a phone, in a conversation, as an ordinary reply. The decision arrives back as the same three options, and the card moves.

That path is optional and adds nothing you must run: a standalone kaambaan gates entirely in its own interface.

Finding what is waiting

Everything waiting on a human is gathered in Operate → Needs you, which is the point of that screen. It holds a card when any of four things is true:

• a gate on it is pending
• an agent asked a question and is waiting
• it is over its budget
• its last run failed

Each appears with its action on the row, so answering does not mean hunting for the card first.

For agents

An agent at a gated stage finishes with submit for review rather than complete. See Writing an agent.