Coordinate and act
The Backpressure Signal
Give the person reviewing AI output an explicit way to pause new production when the review queue is falling behind, and require the team to honor it.
Developed by Superadditive in our own review of the research. The name comes from software engineering, where backpressure is how a slow part of a system tells a fast part to slow down.
Ongoing habit · Minutes to start · Anyone on the team can start it
Try this first
Agree that the person checking can pause new output at any time, and that the pause is honored without argument.
Use it when
Reviewers are falling behind the volume of AI output and feel they can't say so.
Skip it when
This assumes verification is the bottleneck. If the checker has capacity and the problem sits elsewhere, the signal just hides it.
How to introduce it
Give the person verifying AI output a clean way to say stop generating, I am behind. Make honoring it the norm, so it does not read as the verifier being slow. The model produces fast and the person checks slowly. Without a way to say slow down, the checker drowns and starts waving things through.
How to show up
Set the signal, then make honoring it routine. The first use decides whether there is a second. Watch for the flooded checker who stops checking instead of signaling, and make signaling the easier move.
How long it takes
No real setup beyond agreeing the signal and the norm.
What makes it hard
Verifiers think asking for a pause marks them as the weak link, so the norm has to remove that stigma out loud. Under deadline the temptation is to override and push output through, which is precisely what produces the waved-through errors.
What it looks like when it's working
Verifiers call a pause before they drown, the team honors it, and waved-through errors drop. Silent checkers approving under load means the signal is not safe.
How long until it sticks
A few instances of the signal being honored before verifiers trust it enough to use.
How you know it stuck
Pausing AI output under load is routine and nobody reads it as falling behind.
The idea behind it
Human verification is usually the constraint, not AI production. A verifier asking for a pause is protecting quality.
Where it comes from
our review. AI is a fast producer and human verification is the slow consumer. Without a way to signal "slow down," the verifier is flooded and starts approving it without checking. An accepted, blameless way for a flooded verifier to say "stop generating, I'm behind," and a team norm that honors it rather than treating the slowdown as underperformance.
Evidence
No outside source. This move came out of our own review of the research, so treat it as reasoned judgment rather than tested practice.