Week 6: Automation Needs Guardrails

Automation is useful because computers repeat instructions quickly and consistently. That same property makes a bad assumption repeat quickly and consistently too.

This week treats scripts as operational systems. You will model preconditions, side effects, exit status, logging, idempotence, rollback, and bounded retries. The goal is not “automate everything.” The goal is automate only what you can observe, stop, and verify.

This week

1. Automation Multiplies Both Good and Bad Decisions — model preconditions, actions, side effects, and stop conditions.
2. Exit Codes and Logs Are Part of the Interface — use structured outcomes to distinguish success from partial or failed execution.
3. Safe Automation Is Repeatable and Reversible — design an idempotent classroom task, inject one controlled failure, recover, and retest.

Evidence artifact

Create an Automation Safety Record containing a task contract, dry-run plan, expected side effects, failure evidence, stop condition, recovery step, retest, and limitation.