Autonomous Decision Making
Medium
- Category
- Excessive Agency
- Confidence
- 75% confidence
- Finding
Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
- Content
md | Dimension | 0 | 5 | 10 | |---|---|---|---| | Statistical rigour | No sample size, or a number with no stated baseline/MDE behind it | Sample size present but MDE is guessed or copied from the lookup table without checking the actual baseline; power/significance unstated | Sample size derived from the stated baseline and MDE at 80% power / 95% confidence, duration checked against real daily traffic and the 2–4 week window, and the low-traffic escape hatch invoked if it doesn't fit | | Hypothesis discipline | "Let's see what happens" — no direction, no magnitude, or multiple changes bundled into one variant | Directional hypothesis but missing magnitude, segment, or the evidence-based *because*; variant purity not confirmed | Full template filled (change, metric, direction, magnitude, segment, rationale citing data), and the treatment isolates exactly one change with excluded ideas named as follow-up tests | | Guardrails & rollback | No guardrail metrics, or a rollback line with no threshold | Guardrails named but denominators/definitions ambiguous; rollback trigger vague ("if things look bad") | 1–2 guardrails protecting revenue or core engagement with pre-agreed definitions, concrete rollback thresholds, and the peeking-vs-harm-monitoring distinction handled explicitly | | Decision readiness | No interpretation guide; results will be argued about after the fact | Ship/iterate/reject listed but thresholds fuzzy; inconclusive outcome missing or treated as a soft win | All four outcomes (ship / iterate / reject / inconclusive) mapped to pre-committed thresholds, including what an inconclusive result costs and what each outcome changes next |
