Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Main idea
Two ways of asking an assistant like Claude Code for the same thing: have it sort a directory's files directly in its context, or have it write the Python script that sorts them. The visible result is identical — the files are sorted. What is left behind is not.
In the first case, the operation exists nowhere: you can't reread it, you can't know what was done to the fiftieth file, and you can't replay it next month without asking again. In the second, the assistant produces an inspectable object — the sorting rule is written down, it reads in two minutes, it can be corrected, it can be rerun on other files, and it gives the same result on every run.
The shift is in what gets delegated. You no longer delegate the execution, you delegate the writing of the execution rule — and it is that rule, not its result, that becomes the object to check.
Why it matters
This gives a criterion for choosing the form of a delegation, before choosing the model or the prompt: as soon as an operation has to repeat, has to cover a volume you won't reread, or has to be justified later, the right output is the script, not the result.
It also explains why this kind of delegation stayed comfortable: the perimeter was bounded, the output was short, and verification fitted inside rereading one function. Moving to a complete product — screens, internal APIs, data modifications — destroys that property without anything announcing the change of regime.
Nuances and limits
The rule only holds for deterministic operations. Sorting by extension can be written as a script; a classification that requires judging the content of each file cannot, and forcing the script amounts to freezing a bad criterion.
And the script moves verification without removing it: a script that is right on the test sample can be wrong on the rest, exactly like direct execution.
Open questions
- Past what volume of generated code does the output stop being inspectable, and what then has to be produced instead of the script to keep the same verification property?