Saying "no" or "wait" is one of the most powerful things you can do with an AI assistant. You are the editor.
Hard nos
- A prompt asks Claude to email anyone, post on social media, or charge anything. Never approve. Do those by yourself.
- Claude is about to write your seed phrase, private key, or password into a file. Hard stop.
- Claude proposes a "small refactor" that rewrites half the codebase. Scope it down or decline.
Soft nos
- Anything you do not understand. Ask for an explanation, then decide.
- Anything that introduces a new dependency you have not heard of. Ask why, ask if there is a built-in alternative.
- Anything that will deploy or publish. Do it in dry-run mode first, or stage in a test environment.