[bee_rider]

I read it as a mysterious CYA move as well, mostly based on the phrasing.

A possibility is that asking for a written version of the task got the manager to start thinking about the fact that they were asking for something that would be hard to articulate exactly, which revealed some hidden complexity in the request. But I guess that would be asked in a fashion more along the lines of “let’s work out the details asynchronously.”