14. Building Your First Useful AI App (Project 1)
Overview and links for this section of the guide.
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Project goal
You’re going to build a genuinely useful AI app: summarize an article into structured bullets.
This project is designed to teach “adult supervision” habits early:
- clear specs and acceptance criteria,
- structured outputs (so the app can trust the result),
- a clean model-call boundary,
- failure-aware UX,
- reliability basics (timeouts, retries, fallbacks).
Summarization is a common real-world task and structured bullets are easy to validate, render, and test. It’s the perfect bridge from playground to product.
What you will build (concrete deliverables)
By the end of Project 1 you should have:
- a runnable app (CLI or small web app),
- a stable data flow from input → model → validated output → display,
- a schema that defines output shape,
- error handling for timeouts, rate limits, invalid outputs, and safety blocks,
- logging that helps debugging without leaking sensitive data,
- versioned prompts (prompt files in the repo, not in chat).
Why this project is the right next step
This project forces you to practice the “real app” skills that most people skip:
- turning a prompt into a repo,
- making outputs parseable and validated,
- designing for failure modes,
- keeping changes small and reviewable.
If you can build this reliably, you can build most early AI features reliably.
How to approach Project 1 (a safe workflow)
Use this workflow to keep progress fast and safe:
- Write the spec (14.1): goal, constraints, schema, acceptance tests.
- Choose a UI path (14.2 or 14.3): CLI or small web app.
- Implement the data flow (14.4): boundary + validation + display.
- Harden it (14.5): timeouts, retries, fallbacks, logging.
Do not build both UIs at once. Pick one, ship it, then add the other later if you want.
The fastest way to lose momentum is “while we’re here, let’s add…” Keep this project narrow: one job, one schema, one UI.
Ship points for Project 1
- SP1: you can run the app locally and get a summary for a short input.
- SP2: output is validated against a schema (no parsing vibes).
- SP3: timeouts/retries/error states are handled and visible.
- SP4: prompts are versioned and logged; the app is reproducible.
Project 1 map (14.1–14.5)
- 14.1 Spec: “Summarize any article into structured bullets”
- 14.2 UI option A: CLI tool
- 14.3 UI option B: small web app
- 14.4 Data flow: input → model → structured output → display
- 14.5 Hardening: timeouts, retries, and fallbacks
Where to go next
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