Milestone 11: Your reproducible package
This milestone chapter is part of a book in active development and has not yet been through the author’s review. Content may change as the review advances.
This chapter closes Studio 11: Reproduce and package. Its lessons each ended at It is your turn; what you wrote there arrives here as working material, and this is where the pieces become one artifact you can defend.
What this milestone produces. An independent cold-run record and a reusable research package. Working alone, the record is a clean-environment rerun labeled “solo proxy; external cold run pending” — the label, and the honesty it enforces, are part of the artifact.
What you bring
You also carry forward the last milestone’s artifact: Milestone 10: Your artifact, ready to publish or present. This one builds on it, and the chain assumes it is versioned and filed.
Check you are carrying each of these before you start. If one is missing, go back and work that lesson’s It is your turn first; the practice below assumes it.
- Lesson 36 — Replication and Reproduction: your cold reproduction record: every number re-run from the top, one undisclosed choice varied, and missingness classified before any filling.
- Lesson 37 — Open and Reusable Research Packages: your research capsule: the runnable notebook, the data-provenance note with its terms of use, the fixed seed, the decision log, your AI-use ledger, the environment record, the README, and a cold rerun in a second environment.
The practice
- Assemble the draft package first: data or its access route, code, environment, documentation, and licence.
- Run your own package cold, from a clean environment, following only your written instructions.
- Then the external test: have someone else run it without your help, and log every place they had to ask you a question. Working alone? Rerun it yourself after a real break, instructions only, and label the record ‘solo proxy; external cold run pending’ — a proxy never becomes a claim of independent reproduction.
- Fix what the runs exposed — every question asked is a missing line in your documentation — and freeze the final manifest with its date.
A version, not a pass
Your milestone artifact is a dated, numbered version with the reason for the version attached. When later evidence changes it, you write the next version rather than editing the last one, because the sequence of changes is itself part of your research record.
The four rails, here
Four concerns cross every studio in this book. At this milestone they take these specific forms.
- Ethics, permissions, and data exposure. What can be shared is set by your permissions, and the package says so explicitly.
- Evidence, provenance, and reproducibility. Reproduction is the evidence rail’s final test.
- AI activity, verification, and human decisions. An assistant can generate documentation; only a cold human run can validate it.
- Uncertainty, claim boundary, and revision history. Reproduce the uncertainty statement, not only the point estimate.
Where this milestone sits
You arrived carrying Milestone 10: Your artifact, ready to publish or present. Milestone 12 decides whether the packaged work is ready to leave your hands, and what the next cycle should ask. The chain ends at Milestone 12: Your release and next cycle, where you decide whether your finished research artifact leaves your hands.
What sends you back
A failed cold run is a finding about your work, and it precedes any release.
How this milestone is assessed
Each row scores 0, 1, or 2. 10 points total.
| # | Criterion | 0 | 1 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The milestone artifact exists in full, specific to your own project | absent, or generic text that would fit any project | present but incomplete, or specific in some parts and generic in others | complete and unmistakably about your project |
| 2 | The milestone is written as a dated, numbered version with its reason | no version, or a version with no reason given | versioned, but the reason is decorative rather than an account of what changed | versioned with a reason a reader could use to reconstruct your thinking |
| 3 | Every judgment in the artifact is defended by you, not asserted by a tool | conclusions appear with no reasoning, or reproduce a tool’s wording | reasoning present but thin where the decision was hardest | each judgment carries a reason you could defend under questioning |
| 4 | The four rails are carried in the form this studio requires | one or more rails absent where this studio required them | all rails present but one is nominal | every rail addressed in the form this studio requires |
| 5 | The milestone’s own product is present and defensible: An independent cold-run record (working alone: a clean-environment rerun labeled ‘solo proxy; external cold run pending’) and a reusable research package | the milestone’s own product is missing | present but would not survive a careful question | present and defensible as stated |
No work at or after Studio 4 proceeds past a not-authorized determination. This is not scored and cannot be averaged away.
Your workbook
Open the workbook with the badge above. It walks these steps with a cell for each one, ends by writing your milestone version with its reason, and adds the rows this studio contributes to your AI Research Ledger and your Research Dossier.