Grok Bot approvals piling up and blocking routines

Approvals piling up

Bots that ask for approval on everything stall your ops; Bots that ask for nothing are dangerous. How to set the approval threshold and route approvals where you'll see them.

Short answerDecide the approval line per routine, not per Bot: reads and drafts never need approval; sends, payments, deletions and public posts always do; everything else gets a threshold. Then route approvals into the channel you actually look at, and give a chief-of-staff Bot the job of batching them.

Symptom

Twelve approval requests in the app, three routines waiting on them, and you didn't know because you don't open the app. Or the opposite: a Bot that was told "don't bother me" and sent forty emails.

Set the line

For every routine, write the approval rule into the skill:

Never ask: reading, summarising, drafting, updating internal notes, tagging.
Always ask: sending to anyone outside the team, creating or paying bills, deleting anything, changing settings, posting publicly, messaging another Bot with an instruction to act.
Threshold: things like "create CRM contacts" can be unattended under 20 per run and ask above.

Route them

Approvals in the app are easy to miss. Have the Bot also post "3 approvals waiting: [summary]" to a Slack channel or email you check, via a daily routine. Better: a chief-of-staff Bot whose job includes collecting pending approvals from every other Bot into one morning message.

Reduce them

If a routine asks for approval on the same kind of thing every day and you always say yes, narrow the rule for that specific case and write down why. Approvals should be for judgement, not ritual.

Multi-Bot team structure

Symptom

Set the line

Route them

Reduce them

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