Approvals
Signed, single-use approvals for actions that leave your machine or change your branch — where they appear, how they are protected, and why agents can’t approve themselves.
Some actions deserve a second look: merging work into your branch, pushing a branch, opening a pull request. PaneScale asks you before those, and for the ones that change your branch or leave your machine it uses signed approvals that can be used exactly once.
Signed approvals
| Action | Where | Valid for |
|---|---|---|
| Merging a worktree into your branch — you confirm cherry-pick, fast-forward or apply first | Lanes | 10 minutes |
| Applying a Point & Fix change to your working copy | Point & Fix | 10 minutes |
| Pushing an autopilot branch and opening a draft pull request | Overnight Autopilot | 12 hours |
Each approval names the operation, the service, the action and the exact target — a branch, a worktree — before you confirm it. The confirmation dialog says the approval is valid exactly once.
How they are protected
- Every request describes the exact operation and is signed with HMAC-SHA256, so it can’t be altered after you saw it.
- An approval moves from pending to executing exactly once. Even if two parts of the app tried to use it at the same moment, only one would succeed.
- An approval expires after its time window. A denied or expired approval can’t be revived — the action has to be requested again.
- The core checks the approval before it runs the action, not the window. Without a matching, unused approval, the merge or push is refused.
Pending approvals
Approvals that wait for you appear in the bell with Deny and Allow once, and at the top of the Workspace hub. With Bring approvals forward in Settings → Notifications, PaneScale comes to the front when a risky step needs your consent.
Questions in the flow
Other decisions are asked where they happen:
- Approval steps in workflows pause a run until you approve or reject — in the Workflow Studio or the workflows panel.
- Guided turns in Agent mode and Chat show a plan and wait for Approve & implement.
- Tasks wait in Review until you approve them — see Tasks board.
- Agents that ask for permission inside a terminal show waits for you and appear under Needs you on the dashboard.
- Closing a pane with a running agent, discarding a worktree, deleting a chat or a routine — each asks for a confirmation first.
Agents can’t approve themselves
Approvals are clicks in PaneScale’s own interface. Agents — including those connected through the MCP bridge — have no tool to approve, merge, push or publish, and they can’t mark a task done. Voice commands for risky actions such as deleting, approving, merging, pushing, deploying or publishing are deliberately not recognized either.