Most HITL agent systems are approving a story not an action

I keep seeing human in the loop described as the safety layer for production agents. The usual flow is simple. The agent proposes an action. A human reviews a summary. The human clicks approve. The agent continues. But I think the weak point is the object being approved. If the human is only approving the agents natural language explanation the system is still trusting the agent to describe its own action correctly. That is not much better than asking the model whether it is safe. For production workflows approval should attach to a concrete execution step not to the whole agent. The approval object probably needs the current state snapshot the exact tool call or side effect the evidence references the policy version the expected external change the idempotency key or receipt the rollback path and who approved it. Otherwise human approved becomes a checkbox that looks good in a dashboard but is hard to defend after something breaks. The question I keep coming back to is this. Should human approval be a UX moment or should it be a durable execution artifact. For teams running agents in production are your HITL approvals tied to structured state and tool calls or are they still mostly approving a generated summary.