Identity, autonomy, and the human as metacognitive controller

The human and cognitive dimension of handing the work to agents, and the module's
capstone. Students engage with the documented psychological barriers — letting go
feels risky, less typing feels like less work, and work that ships without
hand-written code can feel like cheating — and with the reframing that the thinking
is the work. The discussion closes the course's central thread: in both compound
engineering and the dark factory the human's enduring role is metacognitive —
deciding what to build, when to verify, when to trust, and where to place the
guardrails — which is exactly the human-as-controller idea from EB-1 Advanced and the
oversight philosophy of EB-8, now applied to a system that can run with the lights
off. The Advanced lab asks students to design the spec format, holdout-scenario
gate, and phased-autonomy plan for a regulated codebase.