Week 15: Scientific communication: documentation and reproduction
Can another person run, read, and audit what you built?
Design stage: Scientific communication. Make the pipeline inspectable, reproducible, and interpretable for someone outside your field, and review its ethics.
Prepare for class
Read: Revisit Chapters 9–10 and Chapter 2; documenting an AI-assisted workflow. The chapters are in Canvas, and the companion page has the materials that go with them.
Reading focus: Reread Chapter 9 on documenting an AI-assisted workflow and Chapter 10 on the Rules/Memory/Knowledge package. Check your project against Chapter 2: can a reader tell the rules from the history from the materials?
Bring a version of the project a classmate can run without your credentials, and the promptbook and promptlog from Milestone 3.
Weekly time budget
Outside class: 360 minutes (6 clock hours) maximum planned work per student. These allocations include all required preparation and submissions; they are planning estimates, not time logs for grading.
| Work | Planned minutes |
|---|---|
| Reading and discussion preparation | 30 |
| Exercises and project work, including troubleshooting | 210 |
| Writing, documentation, and reflection | 120 |
| Total | 360 |
Complete the documentation package for your AI-assisted coding and let a classmate try to run the project. Fix what they could not reproduce.
How the weekly cap works. If required work will exceed the budget, save your attempt and contact the instructor to adjust scope or arrange support.
From the book
Exercise 10.2 turns your AI-assisted coding into a package another researcher could audit. Its last step asks a peer to regenerate a sample of your output, and Exercise 10.1.2 asks for a repository a peer can clone and run. Wednesday’s review supplies that peer.
- Exercise 10.2: Build a Rules/Memory/Knowledge package for your AI-assisted coding. Required.
- Exercise 10.1.2: Freeze your computational environment. Required.
The book gives each exercise’s steps. What to submit, and when.
On the companion website: Chapter 10 materials · Chapter 2 project templates · Communication tools
Monday, April 19: Assemble the documentation package
12:45–2:00 PM · PV A203
Do Exercise 10.2. Complete the promptbook as an instrument (prompt set, examples, output schema, model identifier, and settings), reconstruct the promptlog and run notes, and write the rules your AI-assisted coding must follow. Report how you compared model output with human judgment, with subgroup breakdowns.
Check the reasoning: Rules are not the prompt and not the run history. Point to one rule in your project that would have prevented an error you actually made.
Wednesday, April 21: Exercise review 4: reproduction
12:45–2:00 PM · PV A203
A classmate clones or unpacks your project, runs the frozen analysis, and regenerates a small sample of coded output from your promptbook. Demonstrate one view of your artifact and its uncertainty. Close with the instructor tracing one claim back through an artifact to its data.
Check the reasoning: Report the first point where your reviewer could not proceed, and what was missing. If they got different numbers, find out whether the seed, the package versions, or the model changed.
Work to carry forward
Add what your reviewer needed and note what they still could not reproduce. Finish the artifact and prepare the presentation.
Due at the start of P539’s assigned final session:
- Milestone 5: Scientific communication (15 points)
- Milestone 6: Final presentation (10 points)
- Final reflection: the whole pipeline (10 points)
Exercise review 4, ungraded. Bring: A repository or archive with the pinned environment, the documentation package for your AI-assisted coding, a draft of the integrative artifact, and the uncertainty figure. Your reviewer clones or unpacks the project, runs it, and regenerates a small sample of coded output from your promptbook. Record what they could not reproduce. This work goes into Milestone 5. How the reviews work.
Assignments and deliverables · Your project · The book and companion website