Honest comparison, updated July 2026
HumanLayer today is an AI coding IDE for orchestrating agent sessions at team scale, and its classic approvals SDK is deprecated by its own README. Pushary is live human-in-the-loop for running agents: your agent asks a person, including your own end-users, and they answer on their phone, fail-closed, on the record.
These two products used to compete on approvals. They mostly do not anymore. HumanLayer's current job is supervising how software gets built by agent fleets: parallel sessions, worktrees, and human review of research and design documents inside their IDE. Pushary's job is the runtime decision: an agent, yours or the one you ship to customers, pauses at a consequential step, a specific person gets it on their phone, and the agent proceeds only on an explicit yes. Decide which job you are hiring for, and the choice mostly makes itself.
require_approval, human_as_tool, and the Slack and email contact channels belong to the old HumanLayer monorepo, whose README states the code there is pretty much all deprecated, and the old approval doc pages return 404. If that workflow is what brought you here, Pushary is the maintained way to run it now: decisions.ask() blocks on a real answer, fails closed, and keeps the record, and it is shipping and self-serve today.
The structural difference: Pushary is built so the agent you ship can ask its own end-users, at scale, each about their own decision. enroll(externalId) maps your user id to a phone with one keyless tap, decisions.ask() reaches exactly that person, and the decide page carries your brand. HumanLayer's current product is a workspace for your own developers, and its docs do not document an end-user enrollment or decisions API.
HumanLayer's human oversight happens inside its IDE, reviewing artifacts at a screen, which is the right place for design review. Runtime approvals do not wait for a screen: the refund request fires at dinner, the deploy gate at the gym. Pushary sends a native push to the lock screen with the exact question, and approve, deny, and typed answers work from there, with per-tool policies deciding what needs a human at all.
For orchestrating coding-agent fleets, HumanLayer is a serious product from a team with real pedigree (they authored 12-factor agents and influential context-engineering work). Parallel sessions, worktrees, daemons, and upstream review of plans before code exists catch bad direction earlier than any per-tool-call approval can, and BYOK pricing with a free starter tier makes it cheap to evaluate. If you want an IDE-shaped command center for how your team builds with agents, evaluate HumanLayer for that job. Pushary does not orchestrate sessions, and does not try.
| Feature | Pushary | HumanLayer |
|---|---|---|
| Maintained ask-a-human API you can adopt todayCORE | ||
| Your agent asks your own end-users (B2B2C)USERS | ||
| Keyless one-tap end-user phone enrollment | ||
| Native push approval on your phone's lock screen | ||
| Fail-closed timeout on every decision | ||
| Durable decisions ledger, queryable and exportable | ||
| Per-tool permission policies without writing code | ||
| Adds approvals to the agents you already run, no code, any MCP client | ||
| Human review checkpoints on agent design artifacts | ||
| IDE orchestration of parallel coding-agent sessions | ||
| Multi-repo worktrees and cloud daemons for agent fleets | ||
| Pricing | $9.99/mo Agent, $99/mo Partner, self-serve | Free starter, per-user Pro, self-serve (as of July 2026) |
Competitor rows reflect HumanLayer's public site, docs, and repository state as of July 2026. Their product is evolving quickly, so check their site for current state.
As of July 2026, HumanLayer is an AI coding IDE and collaboration platform for orchestrating coding-agent sessions at team scale: parallel Claude Code and Codex sessions with your own keys, multi-repo worktrees, local and cloud daemons, and a structured workflow with human review on research and design documents before implementation. It went through a CodeLayer rebrand in late 2025 and has since returned to the HumanLayer name, with public self-serve pricing.
The classic SDK (require_approval, human_as_tool, Slack and email contact channels) is deprecated. The company's own GitHub README says the code in the old monorepo is, in their words, pretty much all deprecated, the old approval docs pages return 404, and the Python package has not shipped since mid-2025. There was no shutdown announcement, so it is fair to call it unmaintained rather than shut down, and it is not what their current product markets.
They now solve different problems. HumanLayer supervises the building of software by agent fleets inside its IDE, with humans reviewing plans and designs. Pushary is a live human-in-the-loop API for running agents: when an agent hits a step a person must decide, decisions.ask() sends it to that person's phone, blocks fail-closed until they respond, and records the outcome. If you came here looking for the old require_approval workflow, Pushary is the maintained way to get that job done today.
With Pushary, yes, and that is its distinctive shape. enroll(externalId) maps your own user id to a phone through a keyless one-tap link, and each decisions.ask() reaches that specific user about their own action, with the decide page carrying your brand. HumanLayer's current product is for your own development team working inside their IDE, and its docs do not document end-user enrollment or a decisions API.
Pushary is self-serve: the Agent plan is $9.99/mo for a solo developer approving their own agents, and the Partner plan is $99/mo for products embedding decisions for their end-users. HumanLayer lists a free starter tier and per-user Pro pricing on its site as of July 2026; check their pricing page for current numbers.
HumanLayer's IDE orchestrates coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex under your own keys. Pushary attaches to the agents you already run (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Windsurf, any MCP client) for approvals and notifications, and its SDKs add human-in-the-loop to agents you build with the Vercel AI SDK, LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, Mastra, the OpenAI Agents SDK, Eve, Hermes, or OpenClaw.
enroll(externalId) connects a phone with one keyless tap. decisions.ask() blocks on the answer, fail-closed, with every outcome in a durable ledger. For your own agents and for the ones you ship to your users.
