Walkthrough

Capstone: Design and Ship a Roster

Pick a real recurring chore. Run it through the Manager for a week. Measure. Keep, tune, or kill.

The Course 3 capstone is the proof. Pick a recurring chore in your work that's currently human-driven and tedious — triage, dependency bumps, doc updates, dead-code sweeps. Write the brief once, run it through the Agent Manager for a week, and measure whether it earned a permanent place in your workflow.

Steps · 0 / 5 done
  1. Pick the chore

    Real, recurring, currently yours. Not a green-field idea — something you'd hand an intern with a checklist.

    I'm delegating: <one sentence>. Current pain: <one sentence>. Done when: <one observable outcome>.
    VerifyThree-sentence brief. If it doesn't fit, the chore is too vague to delegate yet.
  2. Write the reusable brief + knowledge

    The brief is the spec: scope, constraints, verification steps, PR rules. Put the durable rules in the knowledge base so every run starts warm.

    # Brief: weekly dep bumps
    - Scope: minor + patch only; majors get flagged, never applied.
    - Verify: full test suite + tsc + build. All green or no PR.
    - PR: one per package group; body includes changelog links.
    - Never touch: eslint config, node version.
    VerifyThe brief is checked into the repo (briefs/ folder) so it's versioned and reviewable like code.
  3. Run it for a week

    You're the scheduler: same brief, fresh agent, each morning — it's one paste. Don't tweak mid-week; let a week of runs accumulate so the data means something.

    Each morning: spawn agent on <workspace> → paste briefs/dep-bumps.md → review inbox at lunch.
    VerifyFive runs landed, five walkthroughs saved, zero mid-week rule changes.
  4. Measure against your baseline

    Three numbers, same as Lesson 20: tasks landed, rework rate, minutes of your attention per task. Compare against what the chore cost you by hand.

    # Postmortem
    # - Runs: 5 · landed: 5 PRs
    # - Rework after merge: 1 (flaky test misread)
    # - My time: ~9 min/run (was ~45 min by hand)
    # - Verdict: keep / tune / kill
    VerifyPostmortem written, verdict reached, reasons recorded.
  5. Ship the workflow

    If the verdict is keep: the brief joins your repo, the lessons joined the knowledge base, and the chore is now infrastructure. Write the one-paragraph runbook so a teammate could run it.

    # Runbook: weekly dep bumps
    # - Brief: briefs/dep-bumps.md · Workspace: api
    # - Cadence: Monday morning · Review: same-day
    # - Escalation: 2 consecutive failed runs → stop, fix the brief, don't push through.
    VerifyRunbook entry exists. You've shipped a process, not just a PR — that's the course.
Check your understanding
Q1. What's the *bad* shape of a Course 3 capstone task?
· Tick off the 5 step(s) above.
· Score 100% on the quiz.