# Agent UX: Designing Trust

> How much should you hand over to an AI agent — approval queues, visible reasoning, interruption budgets. Working hypotheses and observations on designing trust.
>
> 2026-07-02 — y7.hk

## Problem

Give an agent "do anything" permissions and users feel anxiety before convenience. So how much autonomy actually builds trust? Working hypotheses from data observed across three products in the first half of 2026.

## Observation: the approval budget

Users tolerate roughly **5 confirmation dialogs per session** on average. From the sixth onward, they split into two camps:

- Approve-everything ("fine, whatever" mode) — dangerous
- Reject-everything ("I'll do it myself" mode) — churn

So the number of prompts is a design resource: once it's spent, it's gone.

## Pattern: three levels of trust

1. **Visibility** — what the agent will do next is always listed (a queue)
2. **Reversibility** — every action has an "undo"
3. **Staged delegation** — permissions expand only through accumulated small wins

## Does showing reasoning increase trust?

Counterintuitive finding: detailed reasoning traces **lowered** novices' trust. Noise piles onto the "I don't know what I don't know" state. One-line summary + collapsed details is the current optimum.

## Next experiment

If we visualize the approval budget ("2 confirmations left"), does approve-everything mode decrease? In planning.

*This is a living document — I'll update it as observations accumulate.*