Red Lines: Stop When They Are Crossed
Least privilege, confirm the irreversible, never overwrite originals, check key facts yourself, keep secrets out of chat. Write the lines into the assignment, not into an apology.
Red lines are not vendor terms. They are the stops you write into every assignment. “Be more careful next time” is already too late. These five still hold in six months: they do not depend on what a button is called.
After reading, you should be able to answer:
- Which accident does each red line catch?
- Why does “grant everything first, it is faster” empty out acceptance?
- How do red lines belong inside the five things, instead of as a separate notice?
Five are enough
- Least privilege, revoke after. Read-only by default. Writes, sends, and outbound network open for this job, then close. Always-on is no grading at all.
- Stop before the irreversible. Send, pay, delete, overwrite, merge to main — wait for you. Grok Bot puts sensitive acts through review first. The reason is irreversibility, not the feature name.xai-bot
- Do not overwrite the original. Save the output aside. The original is both the check and the rollback. Without it, acceptance is trust.
- Check key facts yourself. Numbers, public voice, money, anything legal. Three moves are in how to verify an answer: source, counterexample, recompute the number that matters.
- No secrets in chat. Passwords, tokens, and certificates go through the dedicated path the product provides. Pasting them into a thread writes them into every later context that can still be read.
Scope is a red line too. The folder or file set you picked is the world for this run. Outside it, do not touch.codex-quickstart
Full access empties acceptance
“Open everything, tighten later” sounds like speed. It deletes the stop. Once permission stays on, the process no longer asks whether this step should happen — only that it already did. Acceptance becomes an after-the-fact story. Least privilege costs one extra confirm. Full access costs one overwritten original.
Write them into “bounds”
Red lines are the fourth of the five things, not a footnote. If you can write “do not overwrite the original; save the output at this path” and “recompute every figure from the detail rows; stop if they diverge,” do not write “be safe.” What to inspect after a miss is the next article.