I run coding agents the way most of us do now: it proposes, I approve, it executes.

Last week I caught something uncomfortable in my own workflow. I told an agent

"yes, run the deploy" — then got pulled into a meeting. Forty minutes later it

ran the deploy. Different directory. Code that had changed twice since I'd

looked at it.

I had approved the command at 10:00. I had not approved the command at 10:40.

But nobody wrote that down, so my yes quietly survived past its own relevance.

The pattern has a name: stale approvals

DZone recently ran a piece on authorization leases for agentic workflows, and it

clicked: the problem isn't that agents are disobedient. It's that our approvals

have no expiry date, no scope, and no receipt.…