Human Control
Part 6 Flashcards · Human Control
Ten cards on staying the engineer — the ones you'll still want to know a year from now. Cover the right column, answer aloud, flip.
Ten cards on staying the engineer — the ones you'll still want to know a year from now. Cover the right column, answer aloud, flip.
| # | Front | Back |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The three things loops are worst at | watching cost · verifying outcomes · holding onto comprehension — which is exactly the human's job description |
| 2 | What does "green ≠ done" mean? | a status only says the loop finished; verification is what says the work is actually right |
| 3 | The four rungs of the verification ladder | scripts → checker loop → outcome check → human spot-read; each rung catches what the one below can't |
| 4 | What triggers the 80% tripwire, and against what? | at 80% of any cap → report-only + alert, measured against the cap as it reads right now |
| 5 | Budgets stop which cost? Engineers stop which? | budgets stop runaway cost; only the engineer stops pointless cost |
| 6 | The three nested loops, fastest to slowest | agent (minutes) → engineer (days) → governance (months) |
| 7 | The one invariant across the nesting | every arrow points inward: outer configures inner; inner only ever reports outward |
| 8 | What does "prove before overnight" require? | a human watches one full real run succeed at the current level before any unattended run — and promotion moves one level at a time |
| 9 | Define AI gravity | the pull to hand over the next decision just because the last one went fine; antidote — every expansion is a written human decision |
| 10 | The demotion rule | any incident → drop one autonomy level automatically; re-earn it with one watched run (recovery playbook step 5) |
Drill, then: Part 6 quiz — and the methods layer is waiting.
Sources: these cards test Part 6, drawn from Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1), Addy Osmani's Loop Engineering (S5), and Andrew Ng & Andrej Karpathy's public statements (S9). Full attribution: resources/sources.md.