Day 98: Capstone Spec: Pick One Production Problem

Capstone Spec: Pick One Production Problem

Days 98–100 are shipping days. Stop collecting patterns. Pick one production problem your team feels weekly, and freeze a v1 spec.

⚡ TL;DR: One user persona, one SLO set, one tool allowlist, one eval suite, one rollback. Template below. Scope cuts > feature dreams.

Spec template (copy this)

# Capstone v1 Spec

## Problem
What hurts today? Frequency? Cost of status quo?

## Users
Primary persona + permissions.

## Non-goals
Explicit list (e.g. no prod mutate in v1).

## Architecture
Link Day-91 diagram. Gateway? Twin?

## Tools
Allowlist with IAM roles. Dry-run defaults.

## SLOs
Availability / latency / faithfulness (Day 93).

## Eval
N golden tasks in CI; online sample plan.

## Security
STRIDE summary (Day 92). Kill switch names.

## Rollout
Flags, squads, rollback = disable flag + repin prompt.

## Success
Ship metric (e.g. cycle time, MTTR, $ / PR) + date.

# ✅ Spec lint — refuse empty non-goals
REQUIRED_SECTIONS = [
    "problem", "users", "non_goals", "tools", "slos", "eval", "rollback"
]

def lint_spec(doc: dict) -> list[str]:
    return [s for s in REQUIRED_SECTIONS if not doc.get(s)]

Capstone scope examples (pick one)

• Internal docs chat with citations (extends Day 10)
• PR review bot diff-scoped (Day 20)
• On-call suggest-only copilot (Day 40)
• Platform gateway MVP for two squads (Day 80)
• Incident timeline summarizer (Day 90)

❌ “General company brain that does everything.”

Failure modes

Scope creep during week one (“while we’re here…”). Change control: any new tool requires a spec amendment and eval cases. Empty non-goals section — reject the spec in review.

Closing checklist

• [ ] Spec filled; non-goals non-empty
• [ ] Diagram attached
• [ ] Eval cases sketched (≥ 20)
• [ ] Security signed the STRIDE table
• [ ] Demo date on calendar (Day 100)

Series navigation

Day 97: Build vs Buy the Agent Runtime · Day 99: Capstone Build Week Checklist

Last updated September 11, 2026