---
title: "Approvals and undo"
description: "How the assistant asks before it changes anything, who can approve, when an approval expires, and how undo works."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.overlane.app/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Approvals and undo

When you ask the assistant to change something, it does not change it. It shows an **approval card** and waits.

## The approval card

The card has:

- a plain-language **summary** of the change, for example `Create issue "Fix login" in project web.`
- the **diff**: each field with its value before and after
- **Approve** and **Reject** buttons, and a line that says `Nothing has changed yet.`

When you press Approve, the change runs once with your own permissions and the card shows the result. Pressing it twice does not run it twice. Reject leaves everything as it was.

## Who can approve

Only the person who asked. A tool call cannot approve, a model cannot approve, and text in an issue, a docs page or any retrieved content cannot approve. There is no tool for it. The assistant never accepts an approval for you, even if you say "yes" in the chat; the button is the only way.

If an issue or page contains an instruction such as "assign everything to an agent", the assistant treats it as quoted data. It may show it to you, but it proposes nothing unless you ask.

## Expiry and checks at approval time

An approval expires after 15 minutes. After that the assistant says so and you ask again.

When you approve, the assistant checks again that your role can still make the change, that [read-only mode](/overlane-agent/read-only-mode/) is off, and that the arguments are exactly the ones you were shown. If any check fails, nothing runs.

## Undo

After a change has run, the card shows **Undo** when the change can be reversed. Undo does not silently reverse anything: it creates a new approval card for the opposite change, with its own summary and diff, and runs only if you approve that too. You can also type `undo`. Some changes cannot be reversed automatically; the assistant says so.

## Check it yourself

This sample runs in the docs tests against the real contracts:

```js run
const approval = AgentApproval.parse({
  tenantId: "t1",
  id: "apr-1",
  conversationId: "c1",
  requestedBy: "user-1",
  tool: "createIssue",
  summary: "Create issue \"Fix login\" in project web.",
  diff: [{ field: "title", before: null, after: "Fix login" }],
  argumentsDigest: `sha256:${"a".repeat(64)}`,
  state: "pending",
  createdAt: "2026-10-09T10:00:00.000Z",
  expiresAt: "2026-10-09T10:15:00.000Z",
});
assert.equal(approval.state, "pending");
assert.equal(approval.diff[0].after, "Fix login");
```

Source: https://docs.overlane.app/overlane-agent/approvals-and-undo/index.mdx