Human Control
Part 6 Quiz · Human Control
Five questions on the job that can't be automated. The bar is 4 of 5 — though this is the part worth aiming for 5 of 5.
Five questions on the job that can't be automated. The bar is 4 of 5 — though this is the part worth aiming for 5 of 5.
Question 1
"Our loops have been green for a quarter — let's auto-merge and stop reviewing." Name the two rules this breaks and the failure it invites (Step 14).
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It's AI gravity (a capability expansion justified by a streak instead of a decision) and it strips away the human gate that keeps comprehension debt payable. The failure it invites: the first confidently-wrong change merges at machine speed into a codebase whose owners stopped reading it a quarter ago.
Question 2
A loop's cap allows it to keep running; its report hasn't changed anyone's behavior in three weeks. Keep it? (cost-management)
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No. Caps answer "may it spend?" — only the engineer answers "is it worth it?" A report nobody acts on carries zero value and compounding cost (tokens and your attention). Retire it, or reshape it until it starts changing decisions.
Question 3
CI green, checker PASSing, and users report the feature doesn't work. Which verification layer was missing, and why couldn't the others catch it (verification)?
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Layer 3, the outcome check — driving the actual flow end to end. Scripts verify artifacts; checkers verify shape; "finished but doesn't work" lives only in the running system, which neither one ever visits. Green ≠ done.
Question 4
The Day 1 budget incident (tripwire → stop → human raised caps → finish): walk it through the three nested loops (the-three-nested-loops).
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Inner (agent): detected 79%, self-throttled, alerted, and stopped — reported upward, changed nothing above itself. Middle (engineer): read the alert in context and deliberately raised the caps. Outer (governance): had already pre-written the rule "budget is human-owned, 80% → report-only" that made the whole exchange boring. Every arrow pointed inward.
Question 5
Define AI gravity, name its tell inside a fleet, and give the antidote.
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The pull to hand the system the next decision because it handled the last one. Its tell:
capabilities that grew with no written decision behind them (audit the body against loop.md).
The antidote: every expansion is an explicit, recorded human decision — promotion is never a
default.
Course body complete. Next layers: methods · operating handbook · flashcards
Sources: this quiz tests 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.