Directive anatomy

Build-along · ~12 min at your own keyboard

A directive is an SOP written for an AI employee: what we're doing, what comes in, the steps, what to do when it's weird, and how we know it's done. Five sections. Miss the edge cases and you get graceful, silent failure. One lead follow-up sent instead of the whole batch, no error thrown.

Your starter: Pre-send check on a note home

Instructions

Make it yours: Paste a note you have on your desk, keep every never-line, and add the one failure shape your classroom has actually seen (the level it invented, the student it named).

PRE-SEND CHECK

- Read the draft at [path]. No student goes in by name; if a name survived, stop and say so.
- Pull every fact about a child into a table, one per line: the score, the level, the behaviour, the next step.
- Beside each write where it came from: [my paste] / [not in the paste].
- Flag the three shapes: a level with no source, a decision stated as made, a comparison to another child.
- Mark every line not in the paste [YOUR CALL: the fact, and where it comes from]. The decision stays yours. Count the lines and the flags.

NEVER:
- Never write confirmed, correct, ready or fine beside any line.
- Never supply a level, a score or a next step the draft did not contain.
- Never decide what the family is told; list what the draft says and leave the call to me.

The coach checks that what you paste back is your own work. The starter pasted back unchanged won't pass.

Do this

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Share what happened

Paste your five sections (trimmed) with the edge cases and threshold visible.