# Appendix I: The When-Not-to-Delegate Checklist

From Let the AI Be Smart by Jason Santiago. lettheaibesmart.com/tools

Run this before you hand the work over, not after the confident answer comes back. Chapter 13 in checklist form. Two questions decide everything, and you answer them honestly or the checklist is decoration.

## The two questions

- What does it cost if this is wrong. Reversible means the mistake costs an afternoon and a redeploy. Irreversible means there is no walking it back: a signature, a leak, a person harmed.
- Could I personally catch the wrong answer if you forced me to. Not "would I check." Could I. When you read the answer, does anything in you push back, even a small snag. If you have no instinct, no question, no objection, you are not judging that answer. You are receiving it.

## Hard stops. Do not delegate, period.

- Regulated, legal, or compliance territory. Attestations with legal or criminal weight behind them. Four models being confident together is not a qualified human being right, and the gap between those two is where somebody goes to prison.
- Anything with a real person's name on it that carries consequence they cannot buy their way out of. Accountability is the entire point of a signature, and a machine cannot be accountable. It cannot lose anything.
- Anything where wrong means someone gets hurt. Safety, health, a livelihood you cannot refund.
- Private and sensitive data. A leak cannot be un-leaked. It is an irreversible action wearing the disguise of a data field.
- The final motion on any irreversible action. Sending it, deleting it, triggering the thing that triggers three other things. The machine can help you decide. It does not get to pull the trigger unattended.

## Yellow zone. Proceed, but with the full harness.

- High cost of wrong, but you have real footing to check. That is careful work, not a stop. Run the Council, make every claim show provenance, then have a human expert in that domain verify before it ships.
- The Council forks and both sides read equally plausible to you. If you are about to pick a winner on eloquence or on which answer you want to be true, you are out of your depth. Get a person with footing into the loop before anything moves.

## Green zone. Let it run.

- Wrong is cheap and fully recoverable. Let the machine take big swings here. This is where the leverage lives.
- Stay a little uneasy anyway. A flawless month is the setup for the mistake, because the competence is the camouflage.

## The rule

When the cost of being wrong is high and your ability to catch the error is near zero, you do not prompt harder and you do not add a fifth model. You stop, you put the work down, and you go find the qualified human who has spent a career in the thing you are a tourist in. Let the machine be smart. Keep the signature.