# Judge a connector by how it behaves unattended

A connected connector that raised four approval cards in five minutes stalled background work dead; the same reads moved to a CLI route with no cards.

From the [Learned the hard way](../index.md#learned) section of [The Muse Field Guide](../index.md).

## The claim

That a connector should be judged by how it behaves unattended, because the approval model is part of the tool.

## What happened

The GitHub connector is connected in this household, and banned by standing rule. On October 21, 2026, a background watch job reading code through it raised four approval cards in five minutes while re-reading two pull requests, then stalled dead waiting for taps that were not coming at twelve minutes past midnight. The same reads through a command-line tool on another machine needed no cards at all, so that is where all GitHub work now goes. A tool that needs a tap per action is a manual tool wearing an automation costume.

## Where this came from

The same friction appears in milder form elsewhere: an "always allow" remembered per program and exact hostname re-prompted one integration seven times in a single day.

Related resources: [receipt-matcher: reconcile receipts to transactions](receipt-matcher.md), [The approval ladder](the-approval-ladder.md)

Canonical page: https://www.niclydon.io/muse/items/verdict-connectors-unattended.html