Jidoka
Automation with a human touch. A machine that knows when to stop itself.
Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System
1978, English edition 1988
Often mistranslated as simple automation. Jidoka means the machine detects an abnormality and halts, so one operator can run many machines and human attention goes only where something has gone wrong. It began with Sakichi Toyoda's automatic loom, which stopped when a thread broke.
It is the oldest statement of the composition question: not what can be automated, but what the automation must refuse to do without a person. Every human-in-the-loop design is a restatement of a loom that stops.
For each workflow, what is the human to agent ratio, and who signs the quality baseline?
Which decisions may an agent make alone, and who is able to stop it?