Your agent isn't reckless. It just can't see the blast radius.

I've been running Claude Code as a daily driver for about three months now. It writes Ansible I'd have taken a week to write. It reads a codebase faster than I do. It is, genuinely, very good. It also once wanted to force-push to main , and it wanted to for an extremely good reason. Sit with that for a second, because it's the whole post. The rebase was stuck. Force-pushing would have unstuck it. Every link in that chain of reasoning is sound. The agent wasn't being careless, wasn't hallucinating, wasn't "drifting" or whatever we're calling it this month. It made a locally correct decision with a non-local consequence, which is the exact category of mistake that human code review is worst at catching — because the diff looks fine . It could see the command. It could not see the crater. The thing I stopped doing For a while my answer was to read everything. Every diff, every command, eyes on the screen, hand hovering over Ctrl-C like a man watching a toddler near a staircase. This does not scale, and the reason it doesn't is embarrassing when you say it out loud: reviewing output scales with how much the agent writes. That number is going exactly one direction, and it isn't down. So I flipped it. Instead of reviewing what it produces, I started writing down what it must never do. And here's the good news that took me way too long to notice: that list is short . Not "short for a security policy" short. Short like you can fit it on a napkin. Here's mine: A credential it read an hour ago gets inlined into a source file. A rebase gets stuck, and the fastest route to a green terminal is git push --force origin main . rm -rf "$BUILD_DIR/" runs on the one machine where BUILD_DIR never got set. A version bump gets typed straight into package-lock.json , because that's the file the version number is visibly in. A failing test quietly grows a .skip and CI goes green. Someone runs cat .env "just to see which variables exist." That last one is my favourite, and I'll come back to