Skip to main content
Review gating lets you pause your agent’s progress until you’ve had a chance to review. monocle provides three mechanisms: plan gating via hooks or skills, a per-turn review gate that blocks after file edits, and manual pause flow.

​
Plan gating with /review-plan-wait

The /review-plan-wait skill submits a plan to your TUI and blocks the agent until you respond.
1

Agent submits a plan

Your agent runs /review-plan-wait, which calls monocle review send-artifact --wait under the hood. The plan appears in the monocle sidebar.
2

You review and respond

Read the plan, leave any line-level comments (issues, suggestions, notes), and press S to submit your review. An empty review with no comments counts as an approval.
3

Agent receives your feedback

If you approve, the agent unblocks and continues. If you request changes, the agent updates the plan and resubmits — the loop repeats until you’re satisfied.
This is content-level gating: you’re reviewing a specific piece of content (the plan) before the agent acts on it.

​
Pause flow with P

Pause flow lets you stop the agent at any point during a session — not just at a plan submission. Press P in the monocle TUI to send a pause notification. The agent receives it, runs monocle review get-feedback --wait, and blocks until you submit your review. Use this when:
  • The agent is mid-task and you want to catch up on its current diffs before it continues
  • You want to redirect the agent before it moves to the next step
  • You need the agent to stop while you review something it’s already written
Once you’ve reviewed and pressed S to submit, the agent unblocks and receives your feedback.
Pause flow requires MCP channel support and is currently only available with Claude Code. Other agents (OpenCode, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Pi) do not support the push notification needed to trigger the pause.

​
Turn-end review gate (Claude Code hooks)

When you register Claude Code with the review-gate hooks enabled (the default), monocle automatically blocks the agent at the end of any turn that edited files. You don’t need to press anything — the gate triggers whenever the agent’s turn included write-tool calls (Edit, Write, NotebookEdit, MultiEdit).
1

Agent edits files during its turn

Each time a write-tool fires, the PostToolUse hook marks the session as having unreviewed changes.
2

Agent's turn ends

The Stop hook fires and checks for unreviewed activity. If write-tools fired during the turn, the hook blocks and waits for your review.
3

You review and respond

Open monocle and review the diffs. Press S to submit. If you approve, the agent’s next turn starts. If you request changes, the feedback is sent back and the agent continues working to address it.
If no file edits happened during the turn (for example, a pure-chat response), the hook exits immediately and the turn ends normally. To opt out of the turn-end review gate, pass --no-review-gate when registering or uncheck the option in the TUI wizard. See the CLI reference for details.
Hooks don’t fire when Claude is launched with --dangerously-load-development-channels. If you rely on MCP channels for push notifications, the hook toggles are no-ops at runtime.

​
Choosing the right mechanism