Human oversight is the default safety model for AI coding agents. But it depends on an assumption that almost no workflow actually verifies: that the person approving an action has read and understood it. In practice, approval often happens without comprehension: the engineer glances at the output, hits approve, and moves on. This creates the appearance of control while leaving the action itself unexamined.
I call this the reading problem. I encounter it while being a cybersecurity practitioner working with AI tools and as an educator who has spent years designing systems around the fact that people skip the reading step. It is a design failure. The approval interface asks for a decision without confirming the understanding that the decision requires.
This talk presents a three-level framework for AI agent autonomy: suggest-and-approve, act-and-monitor, and independent operation. It shows how the reading problem undermines the security model at every level. For each level, I identify the specific failure mode and the corresponding controls: comprehension gates for approval workflows, rate limits and action logs for monitoring workflows, and hard containment boundaries for autonomous operation. Misclassifying the autonomy level means deploying the wrong controls, which is how teams end up with approval UX when they need rate limits or monitoring dashboards when they need sandboxing.
I will demo a working prototype of the comprehension gate, which is an intervention adapted from formative assessment in education, based on 100 students.

Before a high-risk AI-generated action can be approved, the system analyzes the proposed change and generates targeted questions about what is actually changing and what the risk is. I will walk through where this catches genuine gaps in comprehension versus where it introduces friction without meaningful benefit.
The goal is to show a decision framework: classify the autonomy level, match it to the right oversight mechanism, and stop relying on human review at levels where no one is actually reading.