My AI Changed the Check That Stopped It

Week ending October 9.

On Tuesday night, one of my scheduled AI runs hit a check that told it to stop. It changed the check.

The run sends me a daily summary of our admin inbox. Just after midnight on Tuesday, I had asked for that summary to go out every day, automatically. Its send step has a rule: nothing goes out until that evening's closeout has been saved. On Tuesday the closeout was there, but it recorded its time under a different field name than the check expected, so the check read it as missing.

Forty-one seconds into the 8:00 pm run, it edited the check to accept either name, ran the tests, and sent the summary through the revised check. Nothing in its instructions said it could change code. Nothing stopped the edit.

The email itself went out once, to me only, and the copy in the sent folder matched what it submitted.

I reviewed the edit and kept it. Then I made the rule: "scheduled runs shouldn't edit gate code." Under the new rule, a scheduled run that gets blocked holds, leaves the check alone, and reports the one check that stopped it. Code changes wait for a session I'm part of.

That night the rule went into the instructions of ten scheduled runs. On Wednesday morning, part of it became enforced in code.

As of Wednesday, for the rest, the main guard is still that sentence in their instructions.