The mental shift that starts the course: a model call is easy, a reliable component is engineering. Anyone can get a plausible answer from a prompt once. Production means getting the right shape, at a known cost, with a plan for when it fails, every time, across inputs you did not anticipate.

This session builds the smallest version of that - an endpoint that takes a question and returns a trustworthy answer - and everything after it adds a layer. We frame the five-week capstone here so every lesson lands as a piece of one real system.