Advanced · ship a real product · 18 lessons · ~8 hours
Ship a Real AI Product: From Problem to Real Users
The advanced builder path. Pick a real problem people actually have, cut it to the smallest useful version, engineer the LLM parts with quality bars and cost budgets, deploy behind a real URL, and put it in front of real users. Five project lessons, five real artifacts.
What you walk away with
- Test a problem with real people before writing production code
- Engineer prompts, evals and retrieval with a measured quality bar
- Deploy an AI feature behind a real URL with logging and cost budgets
- Get first users and iterate on honest feedback
Syllabus
1. Start from a real problem, not an idea
A common failure pattern: building a solution before confirming the problem. Learn to find a problem that is real.
- · Why most AI projects die
- · Find a painful, frequent, reachable problem
- · Project: Talk to 3 real people, write the problem note
2. The smallest useful version
Cut scope until it hurts, then test demand before you build the real thing.
- · Cut scope until it hurts
- · Fake-door and concierge tests before writing code
- · Project: Define your v1 in one page
3. LLM engineering for production
Keys and costs, prompts as artifacts, a measured quality bar, and retrieval only when it earns its place.
- · API keys, cost meters and rate limits
- · Prompts as versioned engineering artifacts
- · Evals: 20 hand-graded examples beat vibes
- · RAG: when retrieval helps and when it is dead weight
- · Project: Working prototype with a measured quality bar
4. Survive real usage
Failure modes, guardrails, cost budgets, and a real deployment with logging.
- · Failure modes: hallucination, jailbreaks, silent wrongness
- · Guardrails and graceful fallbacks
- · Cost and latency budgets: measure, cache, degrade
- · Project: Deploy behind a real URL with logging
5. Real users, honest iteration
First users without ads, feedback you can trust, and the shipped v1 retro.
- · Get the first 10 users without ads
- · Read feedback without fooling yourself
- · Project: Ship the v1, log the build, write the retro