A housing authority's engineering team is preparing a code change to casework-eligibility logic that touches residents' sensitive personal data. Which Agents CLI operating mode should they select for this specific change?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think about handing over your car keys: for a quick trip to the corner store you might toss them over without a second thought, but for a drive through a school zone with your kid in the back seat, you take the wheel yourself. Sensitive casework data is that school zone, and human mode keeps a person's hands on the wheel for every step instead of letting the agent drive alone. Agent mode is for the routine, lower-stakes changes where autonomous execution doesn't put sensitive data at risk.
Full Explanation
Agents CLI's human mode routes execution through a person who drives or approves each step, while agent mode lets the coding agent act autonomously; selecting between them is a per-task decision based on the risk and sensitivity of what's being touched, not a single blanket setting for the whole deployment. A change to eligibility logic handling residents' personal data is exactly the case human mode exists for.
Treating governance checkpoints as a substitute for direct human control conflates two different safeguards: checkpoints add oversight signals inside an autonomous run, but they don't replace a person actually driving a change that touches protected data. Using the change's small size to justify autonomous execution confuses effort with sensitivity — a one-line diff can still expose sensitive fields. Reviewing only after merge defeats the purpose of the control, since the unsafe change has already reached production by the time anyone looks at it.
Scope note: mode selection should be evaluated per code path, not per repository, since one repo can mix sensitive and routine logic. Operational check: before letting any workflow run in agent mode, confirm the code paths it can touch don't include personally identifiable or protected data fields.