Draft Generation With Mandatory Human Review; What NOT to Automate

Learning objectives

• Design a draft-generation prompt that always includes founder disclosure.
• Explain why jordanburke/reddit-mcp-server excludes voting/DM tools as a design pattern.
• List, without hedging, actions that must never be automated on this platform.
• Critique a real "24/7 AI agent" case and identify a compliant rebuild.

Prerequisites: Lesson 5.3.1; Stage 1's ethics-line lesson; Lesson 5.1.2.

Core concepts

Everything in Modules 5.1-5.3 builds to this: an AI model may draft a reply. It must never post one. That's the entire ethical architecture of this stack.

The strongest enforcement pattern is infrastructural, not just prompt-level: jordanburke/reddit-mcp-server intentionally excludes voting and private-messaging tools from its available tool set entirely (repo README, fetched July 2026). If the tool to vote or DM doesn't exist in the agent's action space, no prompt injection or automation bug can trigger it. Design your own pipeline the same way: the only available tools should be read, analyze, score, and draft-to-a-holding-location, never post, comment, vote, or message.

A good draft-generation prompt does three things every time: writes value-first content at Stage 4's 80/20 ratio; includes explicit founder-disclosure whenever a mention appears ("Full disclosure, I'm the founder of..."), never a stealth pose; and flags its own confidence, so a draft the model scores as generic gets flagged for heavier human editing.

This stage's research surfaced instructive contrasts: one video shows genuine authority-building via AI-assisted drafting with disclosure; two others show "AI agents that promote my SaaS 24/7," one candidly documenting what backfired. Watch all three and name the single behavioral difference: not whether AI was in the pipeline, but whether a human read and approved the exact words every time, with no volume-driven exceptions.

Close the module with the memorized "what NOT to automate" list: never automate posting/commenting/replying; never automate voting in any direction; never automate DMs, even "personalized" per-recipient ones; never run multiple accounts to simulate independent voices; never feed Reddit data into model training without a written agreement. Everything upstream, monitoring, scoring, drafting, is fair game and a genuine advantage. Everything on this list is a policy violation regardless of intent.

Video lessons

Supporting reading

• jordanburke/reddit-mcp-server, GitHub (https://github.com/jordanburke/reddit-mcp-server), revisit the README for the voting/DM exclusion as an architectural safeguard.
• Reddit Responsible Builder Policy (https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/42728983564564-Responsible-Builder-Policy), re-read the consent and scoped-purpose clauses against your own design.
• Reddit automation bot: build one that won't get banned, CodeWords (https://www.codewords.ai/blog/reddit-automation-bot), bridges PRAW mechanics with ban-avoidance behavior.

Exercise

Take five drafts from your 5.3.1 pipeline and hand-edit each: add disclosure where a mention appears, flag any generic draft for rewrite, and log which you'd post as-is vs. which needed real editing.

Assignment

Write the team's final "what NOT to automate" checklist as a standalone document, citing the specific policy clause each forbidden action violates.

Claude workflow

• Skill idea: a draft-review skill flagging missing disclosure, generic drafts, and any reference to voting/DMing the automation should never do itself.
• Automation opportunity: none for posting, by design, only draft generation is automatable.

Expected outcomes

• Five hand-edited drafts logged with a post/no-post decision each.
• Recites the full "what NOT to automate" list, citing the violated clause for each item.
• Names the architectural safeguard jordanburke/reddit-mcp-server uses and why it's stronger than a prompt rule.
• Team checklist completed and on file.

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