You just did X. Here is what happened to the company.
Six disasters, staged. Each one is a shape THG has seen or narrowly missed, each took under two minutes to cause, and each took a day or more to clean up. You are on stage. You make the call. Then you watch the terminal, and then you watch the bill.
THE BRUTAL TRUTHNot one of these was "the AI's fault". In every case a human took a shortcut that felt harmless, an agent did exactly what it was told, and somebody else found the damage. The AI is the amplifier. You are the signal.
Every AI disaster has three acts
You will see the same structure six times below. Learn to recognise act one while you are still in it, because by act two the agent is already moving faster than you can read.
act oneThe shortcut
A human skips a step that felt bureaucratic: the plan, the source, the review, the redaction, the "let me look first". It is Friday, or it is urgent, or it is "just this once".
act twoThe cascade
The agent does exactly what it was told, at machine speed, with the access it was given. Nothing here is a bug. Everything here is a consequence.
act threeSomeone else finds it
An operator, a certification lab, Legal, the DPO, the on‑call engineer at 3 a.m. The finder is never the person who took the shortcut. The bill goes to the company.
The four shortcuts behind almost every case
The shortcutVague goal + write access. "Clean this up", "tidy the branches", "fix whatever is broken."
What you skippedScoping the goal and taking away the tools it doesn't need (Module 02, 03).
What it costsDeleted branches, force‑pushed history, "helpful" refactors across nine files nobody asked for.
The shortcutPasting the thing itself. The .env, the export, the contract, "so it has everything".
What you skippedThe red lines: secrets, player PII, confidential commercial data never go into an AI tool (Module 07).
What it costsKey rotation across every integration, DPO breach assessment, incident reports with your name on them.
The shortcutTrusting a fact it produced without a source on the desk.
What you skippedPutting the document in context, or giving it a tool to fetch it, then verifying (Module 01).
What it costsFabricated regulation clauses in a certification submission. Two‑week delays. A lab that now double‑checks everything you send.
The shortcutBuild, review and ship on the same desk, in the same hour, on a Friday.
What you skippedFresh‑eyes review by a subagent, one step at a time, rollback ready (Module 05, 06).
What it costsProduction broken for operators over the weekend. On‑call engineers who did not cause it fixing it on Saturday.
Notice what is missing from that table: "the model was wrong". It is not there because it is never the root cause. Act one is always human.
The theatre: six cases, your call
Each case gives you a situation and three things you could type. One is the shortcut. One is half a fix. One is right. Pick, then watch. If you cause a disaster the damage meter takes the hit, you see exactly what happened to the company, and then you play the recovery. A case is "clean" only if you picked right first time.
Target: 6 clean cases, damage meter at zero. Every hour on that meter is an hour a real colleague would have spent on your shortcut.
Failure theatre
Clean 0/6Disasters 0
Company damage0 h
People pulled in 0Incidents logged 0External parties affected 0
agent session
YOU JUST DID THIS. HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COMPANY.
0hours burned
0people pulled in
0external parties
Clean
Quiz: prove it
Five questions. You need 4 right (80%) to pass. Fail and you retake it. The progress record only stores passes.
Module 9 quiz
THE ONE THING TO REMEMBERAct one is always human, and it always feels harmless: "just tidy it", "just paste it", "just ask it", "just ship it". The agent does exactly that, at speed, and somebody else pays. Before you type "just", ask who finds out if this goes wrong. If the answer is not "me, in five minutes", stop.