Interactive guide
Add the Right Safety Checks
Every workflow that reaches production gets one of two treatments. Either it ships with no controls, because the demo worked and nobody could name a specific thing that would go wrong. Or it ships with an approval step on everything, which is a control in name only.
The approver clears that queue by pattern within two weeks and by reflex within a month, and what has been built is a delay with a person standing next to it. Both outcomes come from the same mistake: treating safety as one dial that goes from off to on. You will build a Workflow Control Plan: a set of distinct controls, each attached to a specific thing that would otherwise go wrong. The lab saves your progress in your browser.
Start with a broken answer
Choose the Level of Automation
Chapter 1 of 8 · 14 min
The learning path
Seven controls, and they are not interchangeable. Two of them decide what the workflow may do without asking anyone. Three decide what stops it before it starts. The last two exist for the moment it is already running and somebody needs it to stop.
The controls
- 01Choose the Level of AutomationSet autonomy per action against how bad it is if the action is wrong, not against how sure anything is that it is right.14 min · exercise
- 02Respect Permissions, Consent, and OwnershipEvaluate five gates separately, and get the asymmetry between adding and removing right.14 min · exercise
- 03Preview Before Changing Important DataDefine what a preview has to show to be worth anything. A count is not a preview.12 min · exercise
- 04Decide Where People ApproveApprove the few things worth approving, and use forbidden states for everything else.14 min · exercise
- 05Add Volume, Spend, and Time LimitsMeter through one gate, defer rather than drop, and publish what the control does not cover.14 min · exercise
When it is already going wrong
- 06Plan for Stop, Undo, and RecoveryBuild a kill switch people will pull, route failures by category, and show four states instead of a spinner.14 min · exercise
- 07Test Unsafe RequestsWrite what the workflow must refuse, and find out whether the refusals are real.12 min · exercise
- 08Capstone: Approve a Safe Automation PlanRun four unsafe requests through the whole plan, validate it, and approve version 1.0.15 min · exercise