Teaching and assessment
On each course, you complete four practical tasks and get feedback from Lee on the work you produce. There are no exams. Here you can read what each session involves, what Lee looks for and how to interpret your feedback.
The engineering exercises use software repositories. On the business course, you work with briefings and other documents. Both courses use the same four rules.
The operating rules
Before you use an assistant's work, you need to know whether it meets the request and whether you can trust it. The four rules give you a way to make those decisions: check the result, clarify the request, delegate work you can review and change approach when a check shows you're wrong.
Lee's feedback is based on what you did and what you can show. A check you planned but didn't run can't tell us whether the work was correct.
The four modules
Each session lasts 40 minutes and takes place live online. You'll spend most of that time working on a prepared task, then get Lee's review of what you did.
1. Verification
You start with work an assistant has already produced. Your job is to decide whether to accept it.
Engineers receive a patch for a transcript service. The supplied tests pass, but you'll need to look further before approving it. On the business course, you check a client briefing against its sources and decide what can be sent.
Lee reads your review alongside the checks you ran. He looks at how much of the work you inspected, what extra checks you chose and whether your conclusions follow from the results.
2. Problem definition
This time, you have to find out what a request means before asking an assistant to act on it.
Engineering learners turn a one-line request into testable criteria, constraints, questions and a verification plan before implementation. Business learners turn a vague message into a written definition of purpose, audience and success measure.
Lee checks that you wrote the definition before starting the work. He also checks whether someone could test your criteria, which assumptions you recorded and how you made the decisions the request left open.
3. Bounded delegation
You plan the work in pieces, with a review after each one.
Engineers add project notes to an existing repository. You'll have to work around old code, conflicting conventions, security-sensitive helpers and a strict policy on dependencies. Business learners prepare a customer pack from internal documents, deciding what to delegate at each stage.
Lee looks at the instructions for each step and how you checked the result. If the assistant changed something outside the request, did you catch it? You should be able to explain the finished work yourself.
4. Recovery
The final task asks you to investigate a problem and drop your first explanation if the evidence rules it out.
Engineers investigate stale note history. It looks like a cache problem, but you'll need to establish whether that explains the failure. On the business course, a summary has already been sent and you have records that disagree with it. You need to work out what happened and send a correction.
Lee looks for checks that could disprove your idea, and at what you did when one failed. If you started again, what did you keep from the investigation? The finished work should contain the intended fix, without changes left over from earlier attempts.
How assessment works
You hand over the work you produced in the session, including your checks and written reasoning. Lee uses that to judge the result and how you reached it. He'll look at whether you kept to the agreed task and how you dealt with anything that went wrong.
- Keep the results of checks you ran. We need those to understand your decisions.
- You can use any model. We don't score your prompts or count your tokens.
- We don't record the live sessions, and we turn off Zoom's automatic AI summary. You keep your detailed record of the work.
- On a private course, managers receive a report about the group. It does not include your assistant conversation history.
- A short session gives us a limited view of your work. The feedback band applies to what we saw in that session and is not a certification.
The four bands
Your feedback includes one of four bands: Developing, Effective, Strong or Advanced. The band describes the work Lee reviewed in the session. These examples explain what each one means.
Developing
At this stage, you may be relying too heavily on the assistant or the checks that came with the task. For example, you run the supplied tests, see them pass and approve the change. You haven't yet checked whether those tests cover everything the change could affect.
Effective
You reviewed the whole change and recorded your assumptions and acceptance criteria. When a check showed a problem, you acted on it, though your review still missed some of the less obvious faults.
Example: a learner takes a vague request and turns it into acceptance criteria a check could pass or fail, writing down the assumptions they made instead of leaving those decisions to the model.
Strong
Here, you can show why you chose each check and explain everything in the finished work. For example, you ask the assistant to investigate first, choose an approach yourself and only then ask it to make a small change. When it adds something you didn't request, you notice and remove it before accepting the work.
Advanced
At this level, the checks match the risk of each part of the task. You look early for evidence against your approach and can back up your written conclusions with results.
For example, you check the part that writes to stored data before spending time on the wording of an error message. Your first test rules out the proposed fix, so you change approach within minutes. In your review, you include the test result and explain why you finished that part yourself instead of delegating it again.
Engineering or business
Software engineers practise the four modules in real repositories, with Python covering the complete course and TypeScript, C# and Rust variants for selected modules. See the engineering course outline.
If your work is mainly in documents and spreadsheets, read the business course outline for the exercises you'll use.