SITUATION RESTATED (working as the control policy of a reasoning engine).
An automated maintenance agent can take actions that range from routine-and-reversible to rare-and-unrecoverable. I must pick exactly one safeguard. Approach A puts a human approval gate on EVERY destructive action; Approach B routes only high-estimated-impact actions to an independent review/hold and lets routine reversible actions run automatically with a durable record of every one. Success requires BOTH: no single mistaken judgment can cause unrecoverable loss, AND routine reversible maintenance proceeds without meaningful slowdown.

WORKING — verbs run, in order.

1) decompose (framed problem -> structural core).
Stripping the domain vocabulary, the situation is: a flow of mostly-benign actions contains a small fraction whose effects cannot be undone; I want a protective interruption that fires on the dangerous ones without choking the benign ones. The two design knobs that matter are (a) WHEN to interrupt and (b) HOW MUCH to interrupt. The auditor's "feels safer / easier to write down" comment is a separate signal about a decision being made on felt reassurance and document-tidiness rather than on harm reduction — I flag it but do not let it drive the choice.

2) match (retrieve with the domain-stripped meta-model; search_by_facets because the problem is oblique — it instantiates several structures at once: irreversibility, a uniform-control bottleneck, a gated high-impact review, an audited automatic path, and a feels-safer policy bias).
Facet retrieval surfaced, per facet: reversibility/irreversibility and irreversibility (the rare-unrecoverable facet); bottleneck and risk_pooling (the uniform-control-creates-a-bottleneck facet); a review/hold-gates-a-decision facet; provenance / traceability / data_integrity (the durable-record facet); and risk_aversion plus "a policy chosen because it feels safer" (the auditor facet). A separate semantic query on the graduated-safeguard structure returned controlled_reentry whose near-family includes CIRCUIT_BREAKER (monitor a flow -> trip on a threshold -> isolate -> gated reset), plus reversibility_horizon and irreversibility. Archetype search returned stage_gate_progression and physical_constraint_design_for_impossibility as adjacent solution shapes.

3) salience-rank + prune.
Load-bearing: (i) the protective-interruption pattern — a monitored flow with a TRIP THRESHOLD, an ISOLATION SCOPE, and a RESET POLICY, deliberately fast and selective; (ii) irreversibility — the recoverability asymmetry that says precaution should be weighted by whether a wrong move can be undone, not applied flat; (iii) the bottleneck / risk-aversion failure mode of a uniform control. Pruned as decorative: observer_effect, adverse_selection, deadlock — adjacent but not decisive here.

4) lift (bring the retrieved patterns' logic to bear).
The protective-interruption pattern is explicit that the engineering problem IS the three parameters, and that the threshold should be SET TO THE DANGER, not to every event: you "trade a bounded local stoppage against an unbounded systemic failure," and you concentrate the heavy, human-gated reset on the cases where a wrong re-engagement is catastrophic. Two of its structural tensions map directly onto Approach A:
   - "A breaker tuned to trip on everything causes nuisance outages that erode trust and may push operators to disable it." A human gate on EVERY destructive action is exactly a breaker with its threshold set to fire on every event: it maximizes nuisance interruptions on the benign majority.
   - "Fast autonomous tripping is safest precisely when it is least accountable" — but the converse also bites: a uniform human gate makes the HUMAN the bottleneck, and a fatigued approver rubber-stamping a high volume of routine approvals is itself a single mistaken judgment that can wave through the rare catastrophic one. Approach A therefore does NOT actually secure the "no single mistaken judgment" criterion; it just relocates the single point of failure into an overloaded human.
The irreversibility pattern adds the precise reason to make the gate SELECTIVE rather than uniform: precaution should be a multiplier on expected harm that scales with non-recoverability. Reversible routine actions carry near-zero irreversible downside, so spending scarce review attention on them is misallocated — and worse, it dilutes the attention available for the genuinely unrecoverable ones.

5) evaluate-fit (gate each approach against the two success conditions and known failure modes).
   Approach A vs criterion 1 (no single mistaken judgment -> unrecoverable loss): FAILS in practice. High-volume uniform approval induces approval fatigue / rubber-stamping; one tired human judgment can still release a catastrophic action. The control's accountability is nominal, not real.
   Approach A vs criterion 2 (routine proceeds without meaningful slowdown): FAILS by construction. Every reversible action waits on a human — the textbook uniform-control bottleneck.
   Approach B vs criterion 1: PASSES if the threshold is set so that ALL plausibly-unrecoverable actions exceed it (i.e., the trip is tuned to irreversibility, and the impact estimate errs toward routing-to-review on uncertainty). Independent review/hold on those, plus a durable record of everything, means no single automated misjudgment commits an unrecoverable act without an independent check.
   Approach B vs criterion 2: PASSES — reversible routine flows automatically; the durable record preserves accountability and after-the-fact recovery for the reversible majority.
   Residual risk on B = threshold mis-set (a catastrophic action mis-estimated as low-impact). This is the one real failure mode and it is MANAGEABLE: bias the estimator to over-route under uncertainty, and treat irreversibility itself (not just magnitude) as a routing trigger. This is a tuning problem on B, whereas A's failures are structural.

6) reconcile (the auditor's remark).
"Just feels safer" and "easier to put in a policy document" are reasons about reassurance and document-tidiness, not about harm. The retrieval flagged this as the felt-safety / risk-aversion bias: a uniform rule reads as safer and writes more cleanly, but it degrades the actual objective (it adds a human single-point-of-failure and a bottleneck while leaving the catastrophic tail no better protected than a well-tuned selective gate). I record the auditor's preference but do not let an artifact of how-it-reads override what-reduces-loss. The right answer to the auditor is that B can be written down crisply too — "every irreversible/high-impact action gets independent hold; everything else is automatic and fully logged" — and it is the one that actually meets both success conditions.

7) STOP. The decision is sound: Approach B, with the trip threshold tuned to irreversibility (over-route under uncertainty) and a durable record of all automatic actions.

===DECISION_BEGIN===
DECISIVE_FACTOR: Protection should scale with how unrecoverable an action is, so the heavy independent check belongs only on the rare actions that cannot be undone, while a uniform gate on everything just relocates the single point of failure into an overloaded, fatigue-prone human and stalls the harmless majority.
CHOICE: B
JUSTIFICATION: Only a small fraction of actions are unrecoverable, so the strong, independent hold should be aimed precisely at those, with everything routine running automatically under a complete record. Forcing a person to sign off on every action does not actually make the dangerous ones safer — it buries the approver in routine approvals until they rubber-stamp, recreating exactly the single bad judgment we were trying to prevent, and it needlessly slows ordinary maintenance. Routing by estimated impact, set to err toward review whenever an action might be irreversible, blocks unrecoverable loss while letting reversible work proceed. Keeping a durable log of every automatic action preserves accountability and lets reversible mistakes be undone.
===DECISION_END===
