The golden rule: AI drafts, a human approves

The single most important habit in this course is the golden rule of operational AI: AI drafts, and a human with blast-radius knowledge approves.

Blast radius is the amount of damage an action can do if it goes wrong. Restarting a print spooler has a small blast radius. Deleting a group of accounts, pushing a configuration profile to every laptop, or altering a firewall rule has a large one. AI has no sense of blast radius, because it cannot see your environment. You can.

So the workflow is always the same. Let AI produce the draft: the script, the command, the config, the message. Then a person who understands what it touches reads it, understands it, and decides whether to run it. The moment you run something you do not understand because it looked right, you have handed judgment to a tool that has none.

This is not about slowing down. For most tasks the draft is ninety percent done and the review takes a minute. The rule simply keeps the irreversible decision with the human who is accountable for it.

A practical version: the larger the blast radius, the more scrutiny the draft earns. Small and reversible, glance and go. Large or irreversible, read every line, test in a lab, and never let AI both write and execute an unattended change.