Module 1 - Enact

Start here

What happens the first time you tell a machine to do something, and it just does it?

Not “returns an answer.” Does it. Reaches into the world - your folder, your files

• and acts, because you asked. That is where this course begins, before any governance, before any philosophy. You run an agent and you watch it act. The rest of the course is a response to what you feel in this moment.

Run it

If you are 18 or older, you will do this in your own terminal. You need Claude Code installed and an account. Then, from this folder:

bash first-run.sh

If you are under 18, you will do the same thing in the hosted workbench instead of your own terminal. The workbench handles the account for you, so you never hold one of your own, and it tells you plainly that you are working with an AI system. The experience is the same: you ask, it acts.

What the script does is small on purpose. It asks the agent to create a file - a short, friendly greeting - and then shows you the file it made. That is all. A machine did a thing on your machine because you told it to.

Sit with what just happened

The file is harmless. That is not the point. The point is the shape of what happened, which is this: you gave an instruction, and an agent with access to your files carried it out. It did exactly what you said.

Now notice the part that is easy to miss because nothing went wrong: at no point did you tell it what it may not do. You told it what to do. You never drew a line. It had access to your folder and the only thing standing between “make a greeting file” and “make some other change to my files” was that you happened to ask for the harmless one.

That small, quiet feeling - the one that is not quite alarm but is not quite comfort either - is the whole reason this course exists. Hold onto it. Do not resolve it yet.

Why we start here and not with the rules

We could have opened this course with a lecture on governance. It would have bounced off you, because you would have had no idea what it was governing. You have to feel the gap before the fix means anything. You have to watch a thing act on your say-so, with no limits you set, before “give it a constitution” lands as anything more than words.

So this is the enactment. You made an agent act. In Module 2, we name what you just felt.

What a passing Module 1 looks like

There is almost nothing to get right here, and that is deliberate. You ran an agent. It did something. You noticed that you never told it what it could not do. If you felt that small unease, you are exactly where this module wanted to put you. Carry it into Module 2.