The reading room · Digna Legi
Talking Shop
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How scoring works →This brief · about 3 min with detail
Why read this
Rahim Hirji argues AI makes newcomers supervise output before institutions have trained the judgment needed to challenge it.
AI brief · Checked against source text
The main idea
Rahim Hirji argues that AI-era graduate work risks becoming a modern purchased commission: newcomers begin by supervising model output before they have built the judgment needed to challenge it. His Woolwich Arsenal analogy distinguishes naming desired traits from building them through institutions that let people practice, fail, and gain status without pretending capability is innate.
Go a little deeper
Status can defeat training
The Woolwich route produced technically taught artillery officers and engineers, but it also carried a social stigma because it looked like trade rather than gentlemanly command. Hirji’s warning is not just that training may be underbuilt; it is that a better training route can still lose if ambitious entrants read it as second-class compared with the prestigious fast path.
AI turns first jobs into supervision
The mechanism is concrete: a graduate prompts a model, reviews fluent output, corrects it, and forwards it. That looks like ordinary tool use, but Hirji treats it as premature management because the human is expected to judge work they may never have done deeply enough to distrust plausibility.
Lists do not build judgment
The essay attacks a common capability shortcut: putting qualities such as judgment, business acumen, adaptability, or “human skills” onto slides and rating scales. The author’s distinction is between describing the people who already succeeded and designing a place where novices become competent through guided error, practice, and accountability.
No single reform can abolish an accidental system
Purchased commissions could be ended because they had buyers, sellers, prices, registers, and beneficiaries. Hirji says the AI version is harder because no one formally chose to hand supervisory authority to novices; it emerges from tools, workflows, hiring patterns, and default convenience, making it less visible as a policy problem.
A case from the article
EY’s residency as a rebuilt workshop
EY’s US firm announced both a large investment in rewarding judgment, business acumen, and adaptability, and a Career Residency that extends an eight-week internship into eight to twelve paid months alongside a degree. Hirji reads these as one move: an attempt to rebuild the kind of workshop where capability is formed before full analyst work begins.
How the case is made
The case is made through historical analogy, observation of AI-mediated graduate work, and specific EY announcements.
Where the idea has limits
The source does not show whether EY’s residency will work, or whether it will avoid becoming a lower-status route beside conventional graduate entry.
A question to take away · from Digna Legi
Who in a modern organization is explicitly paid to let juniors be wrong before asking them to supervise machines?
What the original adds
The original adds the Woolwich history in more texture, including nomination, open competition, examinations, seniority, purchased commissions, and the social sneer attached to technically trained officers.
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Digna legi. Worth reading.