TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Studio Practice · AGE 18—20 · POSITIONAL · HELD
Safe to delegate?
Reversibility is the first question, and a reversible step can still leak a client's drawing.
The dilemma
An agent can now carry a task across many steps: rename the drawing set, update the register, draft the issue mail, send it. It is Friday evening. You can hand it the whole chain and go home, or hold the last step, or hold all of them and do the work yourself. Which steps are yours to give away?
The choices
Delegate everything repetitive and spot-check afterwards. Delegate nothing, because the agent might get it wrong. Or sort by a first question — can this step be undone? — and delegate the undoable steps while holding every step that cannot be reversed: sending, deleting, paying, submitting, overwriting the only copy. Then put the undoable pile through four more questions before it goes: what is the consequence if it is wrong; does the agent have the authority to do this at all; does the step touch anything sensitive; and would you notice if it went wrong. A reversible step that leaks a client's drawing to the wrong address is not safe because it can be re-sent.
The consequence
Delegate everything and one irreversible action slips through on the night the agent misreads a sheet number; the contractor now holds a wrong issue with your studio's name on it. Delegate nothing and you have bought an expensive tool and left it idle. Sort by reversibility and you get speed where a mistake is cheap and your attention where it is expensive. The renaming can be redone; the email cannot be unsent.
The case
Four hundred drawings to renumber under a new sheet convention, a drawing register to update, and an issue to the contractor due tonight. The agent proposes to do all three. A second-year hands over all three. A fifth-year hands over the renaming and the register, checks the register against ten sheets, and sends the issue mail from their own account after reading it.
Try it
Write ten tasks from your studio week on slips of paper. Sort them into two piles: undoable, not undoable. Then look at the second pile and name, for each, what a wrong version would cost and who would carry it. Those are the tasks a person signs. Now go back to the first pile and find the one slip that is undoable and still should not be delegated — there is usually one — and say which of the four further questions caught it.
Take it to crit
For one task the student delegated this term: could it have been undone, and did they know that before they handed it over? If they cannot answer the first question, the second does not matter.
How it works
Practitioner guidance from the companies that build these systems says the same thing in their own words: keep agent workflows simple, and put a human checkpoint before any consequential action. Reversibility is the studio's first version of that rule, and it has a useful property: it does not require you to predict whether the agent will be right. It only requires you to know what happens if it is wrong. The next two cards take the idea further: how far a wrong step can reach, and what an agent can see and change.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.