The industry has a phrase for human oversight of AI: human in the loop. It treats you as a checkpoint at the end. The agent does the work. You approve the output. The loop closes.
That works fine for small, occasional decisions. It collapses at scale. Three agents shipping in parallel, twenty clarifications open at once, fifty diffs to review, and the loop becomes the bottleneck. The human becomes a rubber stamp on decisions they never saw being made.
A factory doesn't work that way. A factory has a director.
Human in Control (HIC) means you direct the work, not just approve it. Lit Factory is built on that distinction.
What HIC looks like in Lit Factory
You set the autonomy band before the Shift starts. Each Shift includes a roster, a work list, and standing orders for what agents can do without asking, what to check in on, and what to never touch. The dial is set up front, not negotiated mid-flight.
You watch the work in flight, not after. The lit floor shows every agent's current step, every clarification they're waiting on, every tool they're calling. All of it live and unified across your stack. The work is visible while it's happening, not buried in logs after the fact.
Agents ask for help when nuance is at stake. Models can't capture what users haven't yet put into words. Agents in Lit Factory know when to interrupt instead of guess, and the interruption arrives where you're already working, not in a queue you'll triage tomorrow.
The result is a factory you direct, not a queue you approve. That's the difference between supervising slop and directing craft. It's also the difference between autonomy that stalls at the human bottleneck and autonomy that scales with the team.