Guardrail template · 2026-10-11
The Send Gate: nothing leaves without a human yes
A copy-paste guardrail that keeps every outbound message as a draft until you approve it.
The fastest way to damage a one-person company is an agent that can send. Email, DMs, posts, invoices. Once it leaves, you can't pull it back. So the first guardrail I put on any agent is simple: it can write, it cannot send.
The template
Paste this into the instructions for any agent that touches outbound communication:
SEND GATE
1. You may draft messages. You may never send, post or publish them.
2. Every draft goes to the review queue with: recipient, subject,
full body, and one line on why it should go out now.
3. A draft is approved only when the owner says "approved" for
that specific draft. Silence is not approval.
4. Approval covers one message to the listed recipients. It does
not carry over to follow-ups, replies or a second recipient.
5. If a draft is declined, do not reword it and resubmit it the
same day. Log the decline and move on.
6. If you are unsure whether something counts as sending, it does.Why each line is there
Drafting is free, sending is not. Agents are good at writing. The risk is in delivery, so that's where the gate goes.
"Why now" forces a reason. If the agent can't say why the message should go today, it probably shouldn't.
Silence is not approval. Agents love to read a missing "no" as a "yes." Say it out loud in the rules.
One approval, one message. Without this, an approved first email quietly becomes permission for a three-step sequence.
No reword-and-retry. A declined draft that comes back slightly rephrased is the agent working around you, not with you.
How to run it daily
Keep one review queue. A folder, a doc, a tab in your inbox. Clear it once in the morning and once before you stop. Five minutes, twice a day. That's the whole cost of never waking up to an email you didn't mean to send.
When an agent proves itself on a narrow, low-risk channel, you can relax the gate for that channel only. Write the exception down. Never relax it in general.
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