Humans are good at noticing danger signals in software. A button label feels too broad. A confirmation screen looks off. A number is surprisingly high. A missing preview makes us nervous. Agents need their own affordances.

The basic set is simple: dry runs, diffs, rollbacks, and structured errors.

Dry runs let the agent ask, “What would happen if I did this?” before anything changes. That turns guesswork into review. A dry run should show affected objects, proposed mutations, warnings, skipped items, permission issues, and expected side effects. If the dry run cannot explain the consequence, the action probably is not safe enough for delegation.

Diffs make change legible. Agents should not report, “I updated the account.” They should show the before and after, the reason, and the source evidence. Diffs also help humans review quickly. A ten-second diff review beats rereading the whole workflow.

Rollbacks reduce fear. Not every action can be reversed, but many can. Products should say which changes are reversible, for how long, and what rollback would touch. When rollback is impossible, the product should make that explicit before execution.

Structured errors are the difference between recovery and flailing. “Something went wrong” is useless. A good error says what failed, whether anything changed, whether retry is safe, what input was invalid, which permission is missing, and what the agent should do next.

These affordances are not only for agents. They make the product better for humans too. The difference is urgency. A human can sometimes infer the safe path from the UI. An agent needs the safe path encoded.

The product teams that do this well will feel almost boring to use through an agent. Work previews cleanly. Changes are visible. Failures are actionable. Reversal is clear. The agent spends less time asking for permission because the system gives everyone enough evidence to trust the next step.

Agent-native design is not about making agents reckless. It is about giving autonomy the same safety equipment humans have been improvising around for years.

This is part 7 of 10 in Agent-Native Tools.