The Seven Moves
Seven moves that turn work you understand into a system you own: Find, Map, Split, Design, Build, Prove, Own.
Choose work worth automating. RATES, the Quit Question and Risk Zones do the choosing.
Record what happens now, including the exceptions an experienced person handles without thinking. Do not automate the idealised version of the process.
For each step, decide what kind of work it is: a known rule or calculation, a judgement call, or a decision a person must make. Rules Before Guesses and Defensive Programming govern this move.
Set the trigger, the inputs, what happens to them, the outputs, what the system may change, what happens when it is unsure, and how the result is checked. Where Does It Run?, the Permission Ladder and Produce vs Act govern this move.
Choose the simplest implementation that is safe for the consequences. The Three Implementation Tiers govern this move. Coding is one possible piece inside Build; most of the work happens before it.
Test it on real cases, including the ones where the right answer is "stop". The Golden Test Set and the Verification Dial govern this move.
Give it a home, an owner and a maintenance path. The Pilot Charter and the Automation Owner govern this move.
Build hands to the Pilot Playbook: Prove and Own run on its timetables and end in Scale, Pivot or Kill.
The Pilot Playbook, which is how to run a pilot. The Seven Moves is how to design what the pilot runs.
When to use When a repeated AI task has started to look like a system, and you need to decide what to build, what stays manual and who owns it.