The best automations I’ve built share one trait: they are eager to propose and reluctant to act. They draft, suggest, and open pull requests freely — and they stop cold at anything irreversible.
The gate mental model
Draw a bright line between reversible work (writing a file, opening a draft PR, running tests) and impactful actions (merging, deploying, spending money, buying a domain). Let the automation own the first category outright; require an explicit human approval for the second. This site’s content engine is built exactly this way.