Speed works until it works against you

I was connecting Claude Code to cloud storage as part of building my PM operations system. I set up rclone sync to mirror local files to Google Drive. The word “sync” sounded safe.

It wasn’t. rclone sync makes the destination match the source exactly, including deletions. It wiped 22,719 files that existed only in Drive. One word difference between sync and copy, and I didn’t read the docs carefully enough to catch it.

The automation worked perfectly. It just did exactly what I told it to do, which was the wrong thing. I was so excited about the possibilities that I was optimizing for speed without thinking about what happens when the speed works against you.

After that I redesigned every workflow around one principle: manual control over automation. Claude Code drafts, I review and push. No automated sync, manual confirmation for anything that touches shared systems. Every external-facing action requires a human checkpoint.

That principle runs through everything I build now. The failure wasn’t that I used AI wrong, it was that I trusted automation without understanding the blast radius. Now I ask: “What’s the worst thing this could do if it works perfectly?”