---
title: "Delegation Review"
description: "Cumulative review of Chapters 06-08: delegation, automation, and the last mile."
type: review
order: 3
---

# Delegation Review

A cumulative review of Chapters 06-08 (Delegation Not Prompting, The Always-On System, When APIs Don't Exist). Ten questions, drawn from across the chapters and deliberately mixed together — interleaved practice is harder than chapter-by-chapter review, and that difficulty is exactly what builds retention.

**How to use this review:**

- **Pass bar: 9 of 10.** Higher than lesson quizzes, because this is where knowledge proves it stuck.
- **Answer in writing, in your own words**, before checking anything. Constructing the answer is the exercise.
- **With a tutor:** it will run the review one question at a time, grade against the key, and generate fresh variants for any retake.
- **If you miss the bar — or barely clear it — come back tomorrow, not in five minutes.** Spaced retakes are dramatically better for retention than immediate ones. The gap is a feature.

## Check your understanding

**Q1.** Four tasks: (a) refactor using your local credentials and local MCP servers, (b) a long research job that must survive your laptop sleeping, (c) processing PDFs sitting in your desktop Downloads folder while you're away, (d) turning a Slack thread into a work session. Assign each its delegation mechanism and give the one-line reason.

**Q2.** Trace one piece of knowledge through its whole operational life: dictated rule → skill → used by a routine → corrected after a mistake. Name the mechanism at each arrow.

**Q3.** You've been delegating for a month; your direction-to-execution ratio is 1:1. Diagnose two likely causes and the fix for each.

**Q4.** Explain what `claude mcp add quickbooks --scope project` gives a five-person team that the same command without the flag does not.

**Q5.** The Monday routine runs in the cloud and works; the invoice-PDF job fails there. Explain the difference, and where each kind of job must live.

**Q6.** Describe a channel-based workflow for something in your world: the event, what pushes in, what Claude does with which capabilities, and what arrives on your phone. Then say what you stopped doing manually.

**Q7.** A vendor portal has no API. Rank the automation options you'd try in order, and say what determines when you stop descending the hierarchy.

**Q8.** Why is 'read the PDF natively, apply the skill, enter data via the browser' better engineering than doing the entire invoice task through Computer Use — even though Computer Use could do all of it?

**Q9.** Where does the human approval gate belong in an automated purchasing flow, and what three things should the approval message contain?

**Q10.** Your teammate says 'I corrected Claude twice today on the same thing.' What system failure does that sentence reveal, and what is the one-sentence practice that fixes it?

<details>
<summary>Answer key — attempt every question first</summary>

## Answer key

### Q1

**Model answer:** (a) Remote Control — needs your machine's credentials and local MCP; (b) cloud session — survives the laptop, runs on hosted infra; (c) Dispatch — spawns a session on your paired desktop with its local files; (d) @Claude in Slack — thread becomes session context.

**Pass criteria:** all four matched; reasons reference the distinguishing property (local deps, persistence, paired desktop, thread context)

### Q2

**Model answer:** Dictation captures it (phone) → formalized into SKILL.md (structure + trigger) → the routine loads the skill and applies it to live MCP data on schedule → the correction is written back into the skill ('update the skill'), so the next run inherits it. Arrows: capture, formalization, automatic loading + data pairing, persistence of corrections.

**Pass criteria:** all four stages with the mechanism at each transition; correction explicitly flows back into the skill

### Q3

**Model answer:** Likely causes: tasks delegated too small (watching each step instead of specifying outcomes), and/or missing infrastructure (knowledge not in skills, data not connected — so every task needs hand-holding). Fixes: delegate outcome-sized chunks with checkpoints; invest in the skill/MCP substrate so sessions run without you.

**Pass criteria:** two distinct causes (granularity, substrate); matching fixes

### Q4

**Model answer:** It writes the server config to .mcp.json in the repo instead of personal settings — committed to git, so all five people get the identical connection on pull, with env-var credentials resolving per person. Without it: five separate manual setups that drift.

**Pass criteria:** project-file-in-git mechanism; team-parity consequence; per-user credentials

### Q5

**Model answer:** Cloud routines see the repo and hosted/remote MCP servers, and run with your laptop closed — the Monday report's data (hosted QuickBooks connection) is reachable. The PDF job needs a local filesystem, so it must run on the machine: a local scheduled task, or Dispatch to the desktop.

**Pass criteria:** resource-locality distinction; each job placed correctly

### Q6

**Model answer:** Any coherent design: real event → webhook/channel pushes in → Claude applies a skill and touches MCP/tools → a summary-plus-approval lands on the phone. The stopped activity must be a checking behavior (inbox, dashboard, portal).

**Pass criteria:** all four components; capabilities named; a pull behavior explicitly retired

### Q7

**Model answer:** Order: look for any API or MCP server first; then a CLI; then browser automation (Claude in Chrome / Chrome DevTools MCP); Computer Use last. You stop descending at the FIRST level the system actually supports — descend only when the level above does not exist, never for convenience.

**Pass criteria:** correct order; stop-at-first-available rule stated

### Q8

**Model answer:** Each step runs at its highest available level: native file reading is instant and exact; the skill applies rules deterministically; only data entry, which truly lacks an API, pays the browser cost. All-Computer-Use drags every step down to the slowest, most fragile level and multiplies error surface.

**Pass criteria:** per-step-highest-level principle; cost of flattening to screen level

### Q9

**Model answer:** The gate goes before money moves — after the order is assembled, before submission. The message carries: what will happen (items, vendor, total), the evidence (stock levels, the rule that triggered it), and any anomaly flags. One decision, full context.

**Pass criteria:** gate before the irreversible action; message = action + evidence + flags

### Q10

**Model answer:** Corrections are not being persisted — they live and die in conversations, so every session relearns nothing. Practice: end every correction with 'update the skill (or CLAUDE.md) so you know this next time' — the correction must land in a file the next session loads.

**Pass criteria:** diagnoses unpersisted corrections; the persist-it practice stated

</details>