Capstone: ship a tiny AI app
Ship and explain the grounded café FAQ application
A second person can reproduce gold 5/5 cited + 3/3 abstain; demo under 120s from clean checkout from a clean checkout and name the owner for CAP-CAFE-DEMO-01.
1Learn the idea
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Clean-room demo
From a fresh clone/directory, run the commands that prove gold 5/5 cited + 3/3 abstain; demo under 120s from clean checkout. A second person plays café ops lead answering hours/wifi/pets questions from a kiosk and follows your script without coaching. The demo includes limitations: what grounded café FAQ app with validation, five-note retrieval, citations, tests, demo still will not do.
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Evidence pack
Bundle: contract snippet, passing tests, metric snapshot for gold_pass and demo_seconds, security negative probe, rollback note, owner name. Reference CAP-CAFE-DEMO-01 as the drill you rehearsed. If any item is missing, the ship gate fails even if the happy path dazzles.
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Implementation artifact
python -m faq demo --clean --max-seconds 120
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Ownership and next review
For Capstone: ship a tiny AI app, name the human who gets paged, the review date for thresholds, and the condition that triggers reevaluation. Endpoint CLI faq_ask remains the production surface you operate for grounded café FAQ app with validation, five-note retrieval, citations, tests, demo — not a slide. Keep CAP-CAFE-DEMO-01 in the handoff template so the next owner inherits the drill.
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Stage depth
After the peer demo, schedule the next threshold review date. File a short changelog that mentions CAP-CAFE-DEMO-01 and the control that addresses it. Archive the evidence pack where your team already stores launch records. Resist rewriting everything “for real production” in one weekend — operate this slice until the metrics bore you, then widen. Final self-check: if telemetry vanished, would you still know to hold? If yes, you learned the operating posture this lane teaches.
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Field notes for `capstone-ship-it` / `mastery-ship`
Trim the demo script until every command is necessary. Record a peer signature line: name, date UTC, pass/fail. File known limitations as bullets, not apologies. Link the evidence pack from the README. Schedule the next game day on a calendar, even if it is solo. Archive the branch tag or release digest you actually shipped. In this chapter the product is grounded café FAQ app with validation, five-note retrieval, citations, tests, demo, the human stakeholder is café ops lead answering hours/wifi/pets questions from a kiosk, and the incident id you design against is CAP-CAFE-DEMO-01. Re-state the oracle in your notes — gold 5/5 cited + 3/3 abstain; demo under 120s from clean checkout — and keep the invariant visible: unsupported questions abstain; every answer cites a note id; two-minute clean-room demo. Track gold_pass and demo_seconds as the scoreboard. Surface under change control: CLI faq_ask. If you only have forty minutes, finish the fixture for demo relies on personal .env and unreproducible notebook state before polishing UI. Promotion language stays ternary: promote, hold, or roll back based on evidence, not hope.
Go deeper
Before you start
Why this matters
Draft a two-minute demo script that proves gold 5/5 cited + 3/3 abstain; demo under 120s from clean checkout from a clean directory. Include the failure rehearsal for demo relies on personal .env and unreproducible notebook state and the rollback/owner line. If the script needs tribal knowledge, the lab is not shipped.
The capstone ends when a peer runs grounded café FAQ app with validation, five-note retrieval, citations, tests, demo clean and signs the evidence pack.
In the wild
See how this idea shows up as a product and a company — then come back to the lesson. Skills transfer across vendors.
Related lessons
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