Your first AI project

A first AI project should be small enough to finish and sharp enough to evaluate. 'Build an app that uses AI' is a wish. 'Classify ten plant photos with a rubric and a known failure case' is a project.

Bound the job. Write the prompt or the API call. Freeze a tiny test set before you look at outputs. Score against the rubric. Write down one limitation. Ship a prototype, not a personality. If you cannot name the failure case, you do not have a project yet — you have a demo.

Pick a task a calculator or a search box cannot do well (tone rewrite, sorting messy notes). Create five examples by hand. Run the model. Record misses. Change one variable. That notebook is the artifact WonderMind wants in WonderVault, not a screenshot of a lucky chat.

If the project is for school, the learner should be able to explain the test set and the miss. Submitting a generated report as original work is the opposite of this curriculum.