Developer finds AI agent approval gates often fail to actually block actions

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A developer building the Vodou agent framework discovered that approval prompts in AI agent tools can appear functional while silently allowing actions to proceed without user consent. The flaw is difficult to spot because a genuine approval gate and a mere warning label look identical in screenshots, with the difference only visible in the underlying executor code. While adding graph execution and approval gates to Vodou over three days and 30 commits, the developer confirmed their own gate had been a non-blocking warning label for two days. A separate bug also revealed that the framework's parallel tool executor was running tasks sequentially despite using async constructs, because the underlying tool client relied on blocking calls. Both issues were only caught through careful timing measurements and code inspection, highlighting how critical execution-layer auditing is in agent development.

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