The Designed Apprenticeship is the deliberate version of something the work used to do for free. Ordinary engineering work bundled deliberate practice and apprenticeship invisibly into production — the boilerplate, the first draft, the review you sat in — so senior judgement accrued as a by-product. AI automates that work, which removes the hidden curriculum, not just the typing. Judgement was never free; the work was paying for it, and now it has to be funded directly.
It has components, like any architecture: the seats a junior occupies — the Reviewer Seat (judge AI output), the Decomposer Seat (decide what to delegate), the Acceptance Seat (own what ships) — and the method that transfers judgement into them, cognitive apprenticeship: make the expert’s reasoning visible, coach, scaffold, then fade. The target is the evaluative function (learning to judge, not only produce); the honest caveat is that judgement still emerges through production, so it is produce-and-judge, not skip-the-build. The diagnosis is The Missing Rung; the depth treatment is Rebuilding the Apprenticeship.