How to ship an AI feature in a week without losing your weekends
A pragmatic playbook for going from idea to deployed AI feature in seven days.
Day one is for a brutally narrow scope. Pick the single most boring user action that, if AI did it, would save your users meaningful time. Write the input and the output as two short paragraphs. If you can't describe the feature in two paragraphs, your scope is wrong.
Days two and three are for a thin vertical slice: hardcoded model, hardcoded prompt, hardcoded eval set of twenty examples. No retrieval, no fine-tuning, no agents. Just measure whether the model can do the thing on your eval set.
Days four and five are for the smallest UI that lets a real user trigger the feature and see the output. Day six is dogfooding with your team. Day seven is one polish pass and ship behind a feature flag. Everything else — RAG, evals dashboards, fallbacks — is a follow-up week, not week one.