{"course":{"slug":"ai-for-students","title":"AI for Students","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students","level":"beginner","track":"work"},"lesson":{"slug":"a-working-agreement-with-yourself","title":"A working agreement with yourself","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/a-working-agreement-with-yourself","position":9,"of":73,"minutes":7,"answer":"Write down in advance the five or six capabilities you will never outsource, your disclosure sentence, your verification rule and your evidence habit, because the decision made calmly is the one that holds at midnight.","keyIdea":"Write down in advance the five or six capabilities you will never outsource, your disclosure sentence, your verification rule and your evidence habit, because the decision made calmly is the one that holds at midnight."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## Decide before you are tired\n\nEvery hard call about using these tools arrives at the worst possible moment: eleven at night, deadline tomorrow, three hundred words short. Nobody makes good decisions there. So the decision has to be made now, in writing, while nothing is at stake.\n\nThis lesson asks you to write four short things. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the most useful fifteen minutes in this module.\n\n## One: the list of things you will not outsource\n\nName the specific capabilities your degree or your career is supposed to leave you with. Not subjects. Capabilities.\n\nA medical student might write: *taking a history, reading an ECG, calculating a paediatric dose.* A computer science student: *writing a function from a spec without help, reading a stack trace, reasoning about complexity.* A history student: *reading a primary source and forming an argument about it, structuring a paragraph.* A language student: *producing a sentence in the target language without a prompt.*\n\nThese are the things you do unaided, always, even when it is slower. The list should be short (five or six items) because a long list is one you will abandon. Everything not on the list is fair game.\n\nThe test for whether something belongs on the list: **if you cannot do it, can you tell when somebody else has done it badly?** Supervision is most of what is left of many jobs, and you cannot supervise a skill you never acquired.\n\n## Two: your disclosure default\n\nDecide now what you will write in a disclosure statement, and decide it on the generous side. Something like:\n\n> *AI use: I used a language model to generate practice questions, to critique my draft structure, and to check my understanding of X. All prose, all argument and all sources are my own; I opened every source cited.*\n\nWriting the sentence in advance changes behaviour, because a use you would be embarrassed to disclose is a use you now notice yourself making. Module 7 covers institutional rules in detail. This is the personal version, which binds you before the rules do.\n\n## Three: your check for specifics\n\nOne line: *every name, number, date, quotation and reference gets verified against a source I opened.* Written down, it is a rule. Unwritten, it is an intention, and intentions lose to deadlines.\n\n## Four: your evidence habit\n\nDecide how you will be able to show your work is yours, before anyone asks. The cheapest version: write in a tool that keeps version history (Google Docs, Word with autosave, or plain files in git) and never paste a finished draft into a blank document. That is the whole habit. Module 7 explains why it matters more than any argument you could make after an accusation.\n\n## Why an agreement beats a rule\n\nInstitutional rules tell you what is punishable. They are necessarily crude, they differ between departments, and they are silent on most of what you do. An agreement with yourself covers the enormous space the rules do not reach: the moment you nearly asked for the whole paragraph, the citation you nearly did not open, the problem set you nearly copied because it was late.\n\nNobody will check this document. That is the point. The students who come out of the next few years able to do things are the ones who decided, in advance and for their own reasons, what they were going to keep doing themselves.\n\n## A worked example, because abstractions are easy to nod at\n\nHere is a real-shaped agreement, written by a second-year engineering student:\n\n> *Never outsourced: free-body diagrams, unit and dimension checks, writing a function from a spec, reading a datasheet, the argument of any report.*\n>\n> *Disclosure default: I will state which sections had AI critique and which had AI drafting, and there will be no sections with AI drafting.*\n>\n> *Specifics rule: every constant, standard number and reference gets opened. If I cannot open it, it comes out of the report.*\n>\n> *Evidence: everything in git, committed at the end of every session, even when the session was bad.*\n\nNotice what it does not say. It does not ban the tool. It does not promise heroic restraint. It names four small mechanical commitments that can be checked by looking, which is the only kind of commitment that survives a bad week.\n\n## Revisit it\n\nPut a date on it and read it again at the end of each term. The list should change. Things you deliberately learned unaided move off it, because you have them; new things move on. A list that has not changed in a year is a list you stopped reading."},"check":{"question":"What is the stated test for whether a capability belongs on your do-not-outsource list?","options":[{"text":"Whether it appears in the assessment criteria for your course this year.","correct":false,"tempting":"Ties a career-length decision to a document that changes annually and covers only what is examined."},{"text":"Whether an AI tool currently does it badly, since those are the skills that remain valuable.","correct":false,"tempting":"Anchors on today's capability, which moves; the skills worth keeping are often ones the tools already do well, because you must judge that output."},{"text":"Whether losing it would leave you unable to judge somebody else's work on it.","correct":true},{"text":"Whether doing it manually is slower than asking, since the time saving measures how much the tool is really contributing.","correct":false,"tempting":"Uses efficiency as the criterion for a decision about capability; the highest time savings come precisely where the learning loss is largest."}]},"prev":{"slug":"getting-set-up-free","title":"Getting set up for nothing","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/getting-set-up-free"},"next":{"slug":"anatomy-of-a-study-prompt","title":"The anatomy of a study prompt","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/anatomy-of-a-study-prompt"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'A working agreement with yourself', in AI for Students. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/a-working-agreement-with-yourself (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"A working agreement with yourself","courseTitle":"AI for Students","module":{"index":1,"slug":"what-the-machine-is-doing","title":"What the machine is doing when it helps you"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Write down in advance the five or six capabilities you will never outsource, your disclosure sentence, your verification rule and your evidence habit, because the decision made calmly is the one that holds at midnight.","hero":{"kind":"plate","image":null,"alt":null,"caption":null},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"decide-before-you-are-tired","runs":[{"text":"Decide before you are tired"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Every hard call about using these tools arrives at the worst possible moment: eleven at night, deadline tomorrow, three hundred words short. Nobody makes good decisions there. So the decision has to be made now, in writing, while nothing is at stake."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"This lesson asks you to write four short things. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the most useful fifteen minutes in this module."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"one-the-list-of-things-you-will-not-outsource","runs":[{"text":"One: the list of things you will not outsource"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Name the specific capabilities your degree or your career is supposed to leave you with. Not subjects. 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Module 7 covers institutional rules in detail. This is the personal version, which binds you before the rules do."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"three-your-check-for-specifics","runs":[{"text":"Three: your check for specifics"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"One line: "},{"text":"every name, number, date, quotation and reference gets verified against a source I opened.","i":true},{"text":" Written down, it is a rule. Unwritten, it is an intention, and intentions lose to deadlines."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"four-your-evidence-habit","runs":[{"text":"Four: your evidence habit"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Decide how you will be able to show your work is yours, before anyone asks. The cheapest version: write in a tool that keeps version history (Google Docs, Word with autosave, or plain files in git) and never paste a finished draft into a blank document. That is the whole habit. 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