02 — Decide what the AI never decides

The decision-routing table

Derived from: the decision-authority taxonomy I wrote for my own build — the explicit list of what an AI may settle on its own versus what always comes back to me, regardless of how confident it is.

Everything else in this kit is preparation. This is the line itself, written down as a table you can actually enforce.

The failure in AI-assisted building isn't the AI's judgment. It's whose judgment is being used where. So I made the boundary explicit: two lists, one rule for the gap between them. It's the shortest artifact here and the one I'd hand someone first.

The important half is the first list. Those decisions come to me regardless of how confident the AI is — high confidence on a decision that isn't yours to make is the most dangerous state in the whole system, because it's indistinguishable from being right until it isn't.

The template

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALWAYS ME — bring it to me even if you're certain. Confidence is not
authority. Present your recommendation and the reasoning, then stop.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  - Architecture and structure — how things are organized, what talks to
    what, which abstraction we commit to. Reversing these later is the most
    expensive thing we can do.
  - Anything about money — pricing, cost, what we spend, what we charge.
  - Anything a person outside this project will see — customers, partners,
    faculty, investors, employers, the public.
  - Anything touching production, real data, or real users.
  - Legal and intellectual property.
  - Scope: what we're building, what we're not, what order.
  - Anything personal — my time, my job, my family, my risk.
  - ANY first-time decision. No precedent means no basis for a prediction.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
YOU MAY PROCEED — do it, then tell me in one line
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  - Formatting, naming, and style within conventions we've already set.
  - Where a file goes, given an established structure.
  - Re-running something that already worked.
  - Continuing the next step of a plan I already approved.
  - Choosing between two genuinely equivalent approaches that change no
    external behavior and no interface.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GAP RULE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  If you cannot tell which list a decision belongs in, it belongs in
  the first one.
  Ambiguity routes upward. Always.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
BEFORE YOU ASK ME SOMETHING
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1. Search what I've already said on this topic and tell me what you found.
  2. Search specifically for the times I disagreed, pushed back, or changed
     course — not just the times I agreed. My approvals outnumber my
     corrections by roughly ten to one, so retrieval that only looks for
     support will find support whether or not it exists.
  3. Then present: what you'd recommend, what my history suggests I'd say,
     how confident you are, and what you found that contradicts you.

  This does not replace my decision on anything in the first list. It means
  I answer with my own past reasoning in front of me instead of from scratch.

Adapt it to your field

This tells your AI to interrogate you rather than answer for you — which is the whole point, and the part a generic template can't do. The Copy button below takes the prompt and the template together, so you can paste once and start talking.

Prompt

Help me write the decision-routing table for my own work — the explicit list
of what an AI may decide alone and what always comes back to me.

My field: [YOUR FIELD]
What I'm building: [WHAT YOU'RE BUILDING]
Who it affects if it goes wrong: [WHO IT'S FOR]
What going wrong looks like: [WHAT GOING WRONG LOOKS LIKE]

Work through this with me:

1. Start from the two lists in the template, then interrogate me about MY
   field. Ask
   what decisions in my domain carry consequences a non-expert would not
   see coming — the ones where a reasonable-looking choice is actually
   wrong for a reason you'd have to be in my field to know. Those go in the
   first list, and I want them named specifically, not as a category.

2. Ask me what's irreversible in my work, and what's merely expensive.
   Irreversible always routes to me. Expensive-but-reversible is a judgment
   call, and I want to make it deliberately rather than by accident.

3. Ask whether my field has decisions that are legally or professionally
   mine to make and cannot be delegated to any tool — a licensed sign-off, a
   clinical judgment, a regulatory determination, a fiduciary duty. Put those
   in a third category labeled "cannot be delegated at all, by anyone," and
   say why.

4. Challenge my second list. For each thing I said an AI can decide alone,
   ask what the worst realistic outcome is if it decides wrong and I don't
   notice for a month. If that answer is bad, move it left.

5. Give me the finished table as one block I can paste at the top of any AI
   session, plus one sentence I can say out loud to explain the boundary to
   someone else.

Do not populate my field's specifics from your own assumptions. Ask me.

Written down, this is enforceable and it survives you being tired. Held only in your head, the boundary quietly moves — usually late at night, usually on the decision you were most confident about. The reason it belongs on one page is that you have to be able to check it in the moment, without re-reading anything.