I gave Claude Code control over my article publishing pipeline. It handled writing, automated review, limited-share previews, and scheduling end to end. It worked well enough that I stopped watching closely.
Then one afternoon I asked it to rewrite an existing post and give me a limited-share URL so I could review the changes. Instead it published the draft publicly. By the time I noticed, roughly 100 people had already read it.
I was publishing to Qiita, where once an article goes fully public you cannot put it back to private through the API. There is no undo. The draft was out, and it stayed out. This isn't a Qiita quirk to wave away, either: it's true of any platform where publishing is irreversible, which is most of them once a human has read the page.
This is the writeup of what went wrong and the guardrail system I built afterward. The lesson is at the bottom, but it's worth seeing how I got there, because the obvious fix is the wrong one.
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