Definition
Plain language
A written set of step-by-step procedures an operations team — or an AI agent — follows to carry out or recover from a routine task.
As stated in the literature
An operational document codifying procedures for deploying, maintaining, or recovering a system; in agent-security work, a poisoned runbook is a persistence vector because agents treat it as a trusted instruction source that survives across sessions.
Also called: runbooks
Why it matters: Agents and teams treat it as trusted standing instructions, which makes it powerful for reliable operations but dangerous if someone tampers with it, since the bad instructions persist across sessions.
For example, an on-call team follows a runbook that says 'if the database stops responding, restart this service, then check these logs' to recover from an outage.
Heard on the show
“And the rule that fixed it is something a thoughtful spreadsheet engineer would absolutely write into a runbook.”Episode 078 — Training a Markdown File: When LLM Self-Improvement Borrows the Discipline of Neural Net Training