Week 12: Notice 12: Deprecating the Deprecator
The capstone — the course turns its own method into the twelfth notice
24 May 2027
The last notice turns the format on the course itself. Everything true of
the previous eleven industries — a confident pitch, a plain audit, a
rollback plan honest about what it can and can’t undo — is true of the
practice of writing these notices too, including the fact that this one was
written by an AI coding agent under a human’s direction, following rules
that human wrote down in CLAUDE.md before any content existed. That’s not
a twist ending; it’s the same check applied one level up, and the point of
putting it last is that you now have eleven weeks of practice reading for
exactly this.
Outline#
- what changes, and what doesn’t, when the “industry” being deprecated is the method the whole course has used
- why this week’s rollback plan describes an ongoing check rather than an action, and how that differs from every rollback plan before it
- the Sunset Review Board (due this week): defending or blocking a notice with the same standard this lecture just applied to itself
The pitch
Writing a deprecation notice is itself a bounded, well-specified task --- identify an industry, state its function as a lookup or pattern-match problem, cite a plausible efficiency gain, and generate the four-part structure this course has used all semester. A model trained on this course's own eleven prior notices can produce a twelfth, in the same voice, about any industry you name, in under a minute, without a semester's supervision.
Migration path
An industry name and a short prompt describing its routine tasks are submitted to a model fine-tuned on this course's own lecture notices; the model returns a complete four-part notice in the established house style, ready to publish under the course's name.
Breaking changes
The unsatirized part. What the migration actually costs, plainly.
- Economic
- This course was staffed, all semester, by a convenor and teaching team whose actual labour was choosing which industries to feature, checking which economic claims were true, and deciding where a rollback plan should honestly concede infeasibility versus overstate it for effect --- the parts of the job that don't show up in the four-part template's shape. A model that reproduces the template's shape does not reproduce that labour, and a reader who can't tell the difference from the outside has no way to price what's missing.
- Functional
- Every notice this semester paired a confident pitch with a plain audit specifically because someone with domain judgement decided, case by case, what the audit needed to say to be true --- which is exactly the judgement a model imitating the template's surface pattern has no mechanism for forming. A generated twelfth notice would read exactly like the previous eleven and be accountable to nothing, because the template was never the point; the checking behind it was.
Rollback plan
There isn't a rollback plan for this one, and that's the honest answer rather than a rhetorical flourish. This notice is the argument for why an unstructured version of it would be an ungrounded one, and the plan for keeping that from happening is the same as it's been all semester --- someone accountable, reading it, before it goes out. That's not a plan that reverses a migration. It's a description of a check that has to keep happening.
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor
- Idris Fenn — tutor