The capstone lab of the School. A real AI product, shipped to real users, instrumented end to end, measured, and defended in oral review. The single artifact that certifies the Scholar as Practitioner across the AI discipline.
- 01Ship a working AI product to at least ten real users.
- 02Instrument every layer — retrieval, generation, tools, UX.
- 03Define and measure at least one success metric.
- 04Defend the whole build in an oral defense.
- A product with no users is a prototype; the capstone requires users.
- The oral defense is the credential — the artifact is the evidence.
Design, build, and ship an AI product that at least ten real people use for a real reason. It must combine multiple disciplines from the School: prompt engineering, retrieval, tool use, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and at least one form of governance. Ship for at least four weeks. Collect usage data. Define one primary success metric and measure it. Write a full product write-up: thesis, architecture, evaluation, cost analysis, risk analysis, and roadmap. Defend it in an oral review of no less than one hour.
Deliverables
- — Deployed product with at least ten real users over four weeks.
- — End-to-end instrumentation across the stack.
- — Written thesis, architecture doc, evaluation report, and cost analysis.
- — Recorded oral defense with two examiners.
Rubric
- — Real usage — ten real users, four weeks, documented.
- — Full-stack rigor — retrieval, generation, tools, UX, monitoring all present and evaluated.
- — Measurement — one success metric defined and tracked.
- — Defense — the oral review demonstrates command of every layer.
Oral Defense
- — Present the thesis in fifteen minutes without slides above the diagrams.
- — Answer questions on the retrieval pipeline: choices, alternatives, tradeoffs.
- — Answer questions on the evaluation: what would change your mind?
- — Answer questions on cost: unit economics at 10x, 100x, 1000x users.
- — Answer questions on failure: what breaks first, and what is the response?
- — Answer questions on governance: privacy, safety, misuse, disclosure.