Can one representative case cross every critical layer without hand-waving an integration step?
FDE Project Files · Episode 04
Build the Production-Shaped Vertical Slice
Build one thin, complete transaction through input, AI interpretation, rules, scoring, evidence, human review, failure behavior, and useful output before expanding the backlog.
Coming weekly after Episode 1. Target runtime: 50 to 60 minutes.
Questions this episode answers
Learn from one complete path before you scale the backlog.
These are the questions the episode keeps returning to across product, engineering, evaluation, and ownership.
Do failure states and human review work inside the same transaction as the happy path?
What assumption changed once the architecture met a real end-to-end run?
What you’ll see
What Episode 4 shows.
The walkthrough stays anchored to real artifacts and the decision each one supports.
A representative dashboard, bounded rule set, one inference route, one score, one review path, and one useful result.
A real UI/API path before the intelligence becomes sophisticated.
Multimodal input converted into validated application data.
Inspectable rule execution and score contribution instead of a model-invented final score.
Verification, correction, rejection, and rerun inside the workflow.
Known-answer runs across the complete path followed by architecture changes based on evidence.
Concrete 77 Rules evidence
The first useful milestone is a complete transaction, not a pile of finished components.
The slice is deliberately thin, but it crosses the real boundaries. That is where contract mismatches, missing context, unusable error states, and incorrect assumptions become visible early enough to change.
Review the 77 Rules case boundary and evidence →
Start here
Use the same production map with your own system.
The free Starter Pack gives you the shared production map, role structure, definition-of-done framework, and core checklists used across the series.