Week 7 Set: Map the pipeline

Turning the single artefact you tore down in week 6 into a diagram of the system that could produce five hundred more like it

5 April 2027

Before the session#

Bring the artefact you tore down for the Slop Teardown — the same clip, the same channel, the same six-fingered hand or morphing logo you already have opinions about. This week it stops being one video and becomes a symptom of a system.

In the session#

Twenty minutes on why “an artefact” is the wrong unit of analysis: nobody who ships forty devotional shorts a day is directing forty devotional shorts, they are running a pipeline, and the pipeline is the thing worth understanding. Then the exercise: given your one artefact, reverse-engineer the machine that plausibly made it. Diagram it — boxes and arrows, on paper, in a whiteboard tool, in Mermaid, whichever survives being photographed — with at minimum an input source (a scraped verse, a trending sound, a Reddit thread), three generation steps (script, voice, render, whatever your artefact implies), and one place a human or a filter looks at the output before it ships. Work in pairs; the person who didn’t write the original teardown asks the annoying “how would that actually run every day” questions.

Close with the failure-mode question: where does your rejection gate look, and where does it not look? A moderator scanning for extra fingers will wave through a hallucinated scripture citation every time, because nobody told them to check for that.

Afterwards#

Keep the diagram. Week 8 turns one of its generation steps into an actual reusable prompt template, and week 9’s set is supervised time to build the rest of it for the Slop Pipeline submission.