Where I Draw the Line

I get asked for my line more than I get asked for anything else, usually by someone who suspects I do not have one. I do. It has moved twice in two years and it will probably move again, but at any given moment I can tell you where it is, and I think everyone working with these tools owes their colleagues the same.

What I hand over

• Reformatting and retrieval. Turning my own notes into a table, pulling the six dates out of a contract I have read. The judgment already happened; this is carrying.
• First-pass criticism. "Here is my argument, give me the strongest objections." It is not always right, but it is never tired, and it does not care about my feelings at four in the afternoon.
• The blank page. Twelve bad openings so that I can see what I do not want. I keep approximately none of them. That is not a failure of the tool; that is the job it did.

What I do not

• Anything where the thinking is the deliverable. If a student hands in an essay, the essay is not the point, the thinking is. Same for a strategy memo I am supposed to have wrestled with.
• Consequential judgments about people. Hiring, grading a borderline case, a performance conversation. Not because a model could not produce a defensible paragraph, but because the person on the other end is owed a human who stands behind it.
• Anything I cannot check. If I could not tell a good answer from a plausible one in this domain, I have no business shipping the output. This is the line that moves: it moves whenever I learn something.

The version I use in a hostile room

Teachers are the best skeptics I work with, because their objection is not abstract. Somebody is going to hand them something next Tuesday and they will have to decide what it is worth.

Hand over the carrying. Keep the deciding. When you are not sure which one a task is, it is deciding.

That formulation has survived about forty rooms. It is not a policy and it will not settle a faculty meeting on its own, but it gives people something to argue with, and a room that is arguing about where the line goes is in much better shape than a room that has agreed to pretend it does not need one.

The part I insist on is the writing down. A line you have never said out loud is not a line, it is a mood, and it will drift on the afternoons when you are behind and tired — which are precisely the afternoons it exists for.