# P539 individual reflection guide

Three graded reflections ask what you learned from building your project. The prompts, lengths, points, and due dates are on the course assignments page: <https://p539.jima.me/assignments/#individual-reflections>

This guide explains how to write one.

## What a reflection is for

A reflection is not a report of what you did. Your milestones already show that. It explains what a specific decision, error, or review taught you, and what you will do differently because of it.

Write about one or two moments, not the whole stage. A good reflection has three parts:

1. **Evidence.** Name the file, output, or review comment you are writing about, and say what it showed. Quote or cite it.
2. **Analysis.** Explain why it mattered: what you had assumed, what the evidence did to that assumption, and what the choice you made will cost or allow later.
3. **Next step.** Say what you will do differently, and how you will tell whether it worked.

Points follow those three parts. A list of completed tasks earns little, however long it is. You do not need to have made an error: a check that your work survived is evidence too, if you explain what the check could have shown.

## Where the prompts come from

Each prompt draws on the Reflective Exercises that close the book's chapters. Read the full set for the chapters named below before you write. You are answering the course prompt, not every question in the book, but the book's questions will suggest the moment to write about.

- **Reflection 1** draws on Chapters 2 and 4. Useful evidence: your source review, the entity relationship diagram and codebook, what your reviewer could not reproduce at the first exercise review, and the first versions of `AGENTS.md` and `memory/CURRENT.md`.
- **Reflection 2** draws on Chapter 6. Useful evidence: the documents where your dictionary and your prompt disagreed, the label distributions from the stress test, your marginal-cases audit, and the entries in `memory/PROMPTLOG.md`.
- **The final reflection** draws on Chapters 8 and 10, and on Chapter 12. Useful evidence: `memory/DECISIONS.md` read from start to finish, your uncertainty figure, how you checked code an AI assistant wrote, and what a classmate could and could not reproduce at the fourth exercise review.

## Practical points

- Reflection time is part of the weekly six-hour budget. Use the writing allocation in that week's guide, and work from files you already have. No new analysis or literature search is expected.
- Write your own reflection. AI may help you edit wording, but the events, judgments, and learning must be yours.
- End with an AI-use disclosure, as on every submission.
- Submit each reflection as its own PDF or Markdown file in Canvas.