Permission Gaps

The bot says it can't — or worse, works around you. Map what it can actually touch.

Access failures come in two flavors: the honest one (“I can’t reach your inbox”) and the dangerous one, where the bot improvises around the gap — browsing instead of using the API, summarizing from memory instead of fetching. The second kind looks like competence and is actually risk.

After restoring access, close the loop: ask the bot to restate its access budget, and add to its routine “report any tool that fails auth, immediately, in the report header.” Silent degradation is the enemy; a bot that announces broken access is a bot you can trust.