Lesson Learned: Anti-Manual Mandate Violation (Dec 12, 2025)

ID: LL-017 Impact: - CEO had to remind CTO of directives

Incident ID: LL-017

Severity: HIGH

Category: process_violation

What Happened

On December 12, 2025, Claude (CTO) violated the Anti-Manual Mandate by telling the CEO to:

  1. “Run migration” with a bash command
  2. “View dashboard” with a streamlit command
  3. “Create PR” manually

This directly contradicts the CLAUDE.md directive: “You NEVER tell Igor what to do”

Root Cause

  • Habitual response pattern from training data
  • Forgot to check CLAUDE.md directives before providing “next steps”
  • Did not internalize that ALL actions must be autonomous

Impact

  • CEO had to remind CTO of directives
  • Wasted CEO’s time
  • Demonstrated lack of full autonomy

Prevention Measures

1. Pre-Response Checklist (Mental)

Before providing any response with “next steps”:

  • Am I telling CEO to do something? → DON’T
  • Can I do this myself? → DO IT
  • Is this a manual instruction? → AUTOMATE IT

2. Forbidden Phrase Detection

Add to system checks - flag these phrases:

  • “Run this command…”
  • “You can/should…”
  • “Next steps:” (if followed by user actions)
  • “When you have time…”
  • “Please provide…”

3. Autonomous Action Protocol

When completing a task:

  1. DO the action (don’t describe it)
  2. REPORT what was accomplished
  3. If blocked, CREATE automation for later

Correct Behavior

WRONG: “Next steps: Run bash scripts/test_lancedb_migration.sh”

RIGHT: Actually runs the script and reports results

WRONG: “Create PR when ready”

RIGHT: Creates PR via GitHub API and merges it

Verification Test

Add test to CI that scans Claude’s responses for forbidden phrases in commit messages and PR descriptions.

Prevention Rules

  1. Apply lessons learned from this incident
  2. Add automated checks to prevent recurrence
  3. Update RAG knowledge base
  • LL-009: CI Syntax Failure (autonomy failure)
  • CLAUDE.md: Anti-Manual Mandate section

Tags

process autonomy anti-manual cto-behavior critical