Designing real systems: five worked architectures
There is a repeatable set of questions behind every AI system worth building. Learn them in order and you can sketch a credible design for almost any problem in fifteen minutes. This lesson walks through those questions and then applies them, end to end, to five real systems.
Sketch a defensible architecture for an unfamiliar problem, in order, without missing the steps most people skip.
Lessons 1 to 8. This one assembles everything, so it will feel thin if you have skipped ahead.
Plain-English mode
Each section opens with a short summary before the detail. Turn this off once the vocabulary feels familiar.
Ten questions, always in the same order. The order is the point: several of them are impossible to answer until the earlier ones are settled.
Whatever the problem, the same sequence works. Learn it and you will never again sit in a design meeting with nothing to say.
- 01What problem are we actually solving, and how will we know if we solved it?
- 02Who uses this? Not just the end user, but whoever can quietly kill it by refusing to adopt it.
- 03What data do we have, and what data do we need to create?
- 04What does a wrong answer cost? This is the risk tier, and it determines most of what follows.
- 05What is the architecture? Which model, retrieval or not, or not.
- 06How will we measure quality, and what is the bar for shipping?
- 07What controls do we need, and where do they sit?
- 08Where is this allowed to run?
- 09What single number tells us it is genuinely being used?
- 10How does it improve from here?
The order matters more than the list. You cannot choose an architecture before you know the data and what a mistake costs. You cannot define your evaluations before you know the users and their workflow. Most failed AI projects skipped a question and answered a later one on assumption, and by the time that surfaces the architecture is built.
The five are part of the paid course.
Answer in your head first, then reveal. Getting it wrong is the part that makes it stick.
Why does the risk question have to come before the architecture question?
The rest of this lesson
- One: an adaptive tutor
- Two: a citizen services phone and chat agent
- Three: a legal research assistant
- Four: a document extraction pipeline
- Five: a medical scribe
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