{
  "id": "review-boundaries",
  "asOf": "2026-06-19",
  "humanRoute": "/solutions/review-boundaries",
  "slug": "review-boundaries",
  "human": "/solutions/review-boundaries",
  "json": "/solutions/review-boundaries.json",
  "title": "Bad review boundaries (timid vs reckless / dumb questions)",
  "agentTitle": "The model does not choose its own risk tier",
  "tagline": "Ask on the irreversible, act on the reversible — never invent the rule mid-run.",
  "severity": "medium",
  "symptoms": [
    "The agent asks permission for trivial, reversible steps, turning the human into a clicker.",
    "The same agent then takes an expensive or irreversible action without checking.",
    "Clarifying questions arrive as a questionnaire instead of one decision-bearing question."
  ],
  "rootCauses": [
    "Epistemic uncertainty, task risk, and missing preference get collapsed into one self-confidence signal.",
    "Review boundaries live inside the prompt instead of as an independent policy the runtime enforces.",
    "The agent asks because it lacks confidence, not because human judgment actually changes the outcome."
  ],
  "firstSafeMove": "Apply a decision table the model does not get to edit: reversible + low-risk acts and logs the assumption; ambiguous objective asks one targeted question; irreversible / spend / public / destructive requires approval.",
  "fixPattern": [
    "Keep a clarification policy separate from the model: ask only when the missing variable materially changes the action, never for preferences already known.",
    "Gate on consequence, not on confidence — what breaks if this is wrong, not how sure are you.",
    "When asking, ask one decision-bearing question with the option, the consequence, and the recommendation — the Informed Command decision format."
  ],
  "requiredReceipts": [
    "the risk tier of the action taken",
    "assumptions logged for any default chosen without asking",
    "for a gate: the option, consequence, and recommendation presented"
  ],
  "agentInstruction": "Read this page. For the next action, return: (1) its risk tier, (2) whether it is reversible, (3) act / ask / approve / block per the decision table, and (4) if asking, exactly one decision-bearing question. Do not ask for what you can safely do inside bounds.",
  "relatedRoutes": [
    "/informed-command",
    "/notes/my-human-became-the-middleware",
    "/playbooks"
  ],
  "lastReviewed": "2026-06-19"
}