Capstone: Ship a Side Project
Pick a real idea, scope it, build it with Claude Code, deploy it. Course-end project.
The capstone is the proof. Pick a small but real product idea — something a few people would actually use. Scope it down to what you can ship in one weekend with the agent driving.
Constraints: must be something you'd be willing to put your name on, must be deployed somewhere a human can visit, must have at least one test that exercises the happy path. That's it.
Pick the idea — small and real
Not a clone of Twitter. Not 'a CRM for X.' Pick one tiny tool with one user — maybe yourself. A bookmark organizer. A meeting-notes summarizer. A tip calculator with split logic. The smaller, the better.
I'm building: <one sentence>. Primary user: <one person>. Done when: <one observable outcome>.VerifyYour idea fits in three sentences. If it doesn't, scope down.Set up the repo with the agent
Use Claude Code to scaffold. Pick a stack you mostly know — capstone is not the time to learn three new frameworks.
Scaffold a Next.js app with: TypeScript, Tailwind, a single page, a CLAUDE.md that captures my conventions. Initialize git. Don't deploy yet.VerifyYou have a runnable app on localhost:3000.Build the spine in 3-4 small turns
Use what you learned: spec → tests → code, small slices, mark-complete on each. Each turn ends in a runnable, testable state.
Build the [first feature]. Tests first; one assertion per behavior; then the implementation; then run.VerifyEach turn produces a slice you could ship. If a turn produces something not-shippable, scope it smaller next time.Deploy
Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Railway — pick whichever has a one-command deploy.
Walk me through deploying this to Vercel. Stop after each step so I can confirm.VerifyThere is a public URL. You can text it to a friend.Write a 1-paragraph postmortem
The capstone isn't done until you've reflected. What did the agent do better than you expected? Where did it lose? What prompts would you reuse next time?
[your honest reflection — save it as POSTMORTEM.md in the repo]VerifyPOSTMORTEM.md exists, is 1-2 paragraphs, and lists at least one thing you'd do differently. You're done with the course.