Capstone assembly

Cover. Positioning. Artifact 1 prompts (maybe an excerpt, not all five in full). Artifact 2 wiki design. Artifact 3 charter (or the one-table pack). Resume top third. Talk tracks. 90-day plan placeholder (day 30). Quality > bulk. Two excellent pages beat twenty of outline soup. If the folder is a dump of every note from the month, you do not have a pack. You have a junk drawer. Interviewers can feel a junk drawer in the first ten seconds of a screenshare.

The cover is not decoration. It is how a stranger orients. Name, primary role, one sentence from positioning v1, list of artifacts with dates, a line of honesty ("independent design work unless noted"). If someone opened only the cover they should be able to introduce you. If the cover is a mood board, you will spend the first minute of tomorrow's walkthrough apologizing. Write it like a steering cover: nouns, dates, the ask of the reader ("walk with me for 12 minutes").

Order the internals the way you will speak, not the way you created them. Speaking order for day 29 is: 90s intro, 6 min demo story (wiki design + six boxes), 4 min charter/pack, 30s ask / 90-day tease. So the folder, after the cover, should let you open wiki design, then pack table, without hunting. Prompts and resume can sit behind. 90-day is a placeholder page that says "day 30." Talk tracks (demo script, steering script, three pushbacks, four drill sentences) sit in one note so you are not flipping.

Name files like a delivery lead, not like a student. Bad: "final_v3_REAL." Good: "00-cover," "01-positioning," "02-wiki-copilot-design," "03-operating-pack," "04-resume-top-third," "05-talk-tracks," "06-walkthrough-outline," "07-90-day-placeholder." A screenshare that starts with a hunt is a failed first impression. You already know this from steering decks named "copy of copy of." Do not do it to yourself on the day that matters.

One place, not four. Pick: a single notes doc, a single folder, a single slide pack. Mixed tools are how you send the wrong link. If you must keep source files (a notebook, a spreadsheet of evals), put them in a subfolder called "appendix" and do not screenshare the appendix unless asked. The pack is the speaking copy. The appendix is the proof. Confusing them is how a 12-minute walkthrough becomes a 40-minute tour of your disk.

You will not make it beautiful today. You will make it findable, honest, and complete-or-labeled. Tomorrow is performance. Day 30 is the 90-day page. If you start restyling fonts, you are avoiding holes. Holes are the work. Open the next concept and list them.

If you have been keeping notes in five places — this app, a doc, a slide, a notebook, a screenshot folder — today is the collapse. Pick the speaking copy and copy into it. Do not keep a "master" in your head. Interviewers will not wait while you remember which app had the eval bar. Collapse is a delivery skill you already use at go-live: one runbook, one comms channel, one owner. The pack is that runbook. After today, new work goes into the pack or it does not exist.

Keep six. The month was built to produce six things a hiring manager can probe, not a certificate. Artifact 1, delivery prompt library: proves you can specify a contract (inputs, refusals, format) and version it. Excerpt two prompts, not five. If they are not versioned, version them tonight with a date. If you never wrote them, write one status prompt and one RAID prompt now, labeled incomplete, rather than omitting the slot.

Artifact 2, project-wiki copilot design: proves you can design a thin slice. It must contain the job, the users, the corpus, the non-goals, the six boxes, the refuse path, and the eval sketch. If any of those is missing, fill or label. This is the object of the six-minute demo. If this page is still a slogan ("help people find knowledge"), fix the sentence before you outline tomorrow. You cannot walk a slogan for six minutes without rambling.

Artifact 3, use-case charter + eval plan, now also the one-table operating pack: proves you can govern. Owners, bars, evidence, dates. HITL roster. Cost at 10×. Kill. Ask. If the charter is a novella and the table is empty, spend assembly time on the table. Steering does not read novellas. If you never wrote the charter, the table is the recovery. Do not recover by downloading an "AI canvas."

Artifact 4, role target + resume rewrite: proves you picked a seat and can be screened in ten seconds. Headline, profile, four bullets, honesty pass. PDF named with the primary role. If the primary role is not in line 1, you did not finish day 25. Finish it as part of assembly. Do not tick the box because a draft exists in notes.

Artifact 5, portfolio walkthrough script: tomorrow's output. Today you only outline with clocks: 90s intro, 6 min demo, 4 min charter, 30s ask / 90-day tease. If you start writing the full script today, you will skip holes. Outline only. The script is a performance artifact. It needs a folder to stand on, and a night of sleep, and two runs.

Artifact 6, 90-day plan: day 30. Today's placeholder is a page with the heading and "to be written day 30: 1–30 / 31–60 / 61–90, plus job OS." Do not fake a 90-day plan tonight to make the folder look finished. A labeled placeholder is honest. A fake plan is a page you will not remember when they ask in the last round. Leave the slot. Protect day 30.

Anything still TBD is a hole. Either fill it or mark it "open question" with an owner (you, a future knowledge owner, Security) and a date. Never hide. Never invent a number you did not compute. Interviewers would rather hear "cost at 10× is a band I have not closed; here is how I would compute it in week one" than a precise dollar you cannot defend. You already know this from RAID. A red item is better than a green lie.

Typical holes on day 28: no named knowledge owner (because Atlas is a design), no measured recall number (because you did not run code), no legal path (because you are not at the company yet), no HITL roster hours (because there is no roster). All four are allowed if labeled. Write them as open questions on the cover or on the pack table: "Owner: to be named in week one. Eval bar: 0.7 recall@5 is the proposed bar, not a measured one. Path: lightest approved enterprise endpoint, to be confirmed with Security. HITL: 4 hours/week assumed, not rostered." That block is adult.

Holes that are not allowed: missing job sentence, missing non-goals, missing six boxes, missing primary role on the resume, missing honesty clause. Those are closable tonight because they are writing, not measurement. Close them. If you skip them, tomorrow's walkthrough will leak. The protocol is: closable tonight → close. Needs a system or a person you do not have → label. Needs day 29 or 30 → placeholder.

If you bluff a hole closed, you will meet it again in Q&A tomorrow. The likely eight will ask how you know it works, what about confidential data, what you would build in week one. Labeled holes become those answers. Faked holes become stammering. You are assembling a pack you will be asked about while tired. Design it for tired you. Tired you can read a label. Tired you cannot remember a fake number.

Put the hole list on one page, five lines max. If you have fifteen holes, you did not distinguish closable from labeled. Cluster: people (owner, roster), numbers (eval, $), path (security, legal), code (did not run). Clustered holes are a week-one plan. Fifteen scattered holes are a mood. The 90-day plan will eat this list on day 30. Make it edible.

Tick remaining capstone boxes that are actually done. Do not tick because you are on day 28. If artifact 2 is still a slogan, it is not done. If artifact 4 still says generic DM, it is not done. False ticks make the last two days feel optional. They are not optional. Write the hole list as RAID: ID, description, owner, next date, residual if we ship anyway. Example: "H2 — recall@5 not measured — owner you — date week one with engineer — residual: do not put in front of users until the table exists." That line is more hireable than a fake 0.81. Put H-items on the cover or on the pack table so tomorrow's Q&A can point at them instead of inventing.

Imagine they ask you to share your screen at minute one. You open the cover. You say the one sentence. You ask which they want: slice or pack. If they say slice, you open the wiki design and draw the six boxes (from memory, the file is a crutch). If they say pack, you open the table. If they say "just walk it," you follow tomorrow's clocks. The folder has to support all three without you scrolling through diary notes from day 9.

Cover → (positioning, optional, if a recruiter) → wiki design → operating pack → talk tracks if you freeze → resume only if they ask to see paper. That is the live path. Prompts, appendix, 90-day placeholder are off the live path unless asked. If you cannot describe that path in one breath, the folder is still a dump. Rearrange now. Rearranging tomorrow while performing is how people open the wrong file in a loop. You have seen it. Do not be it.

If you use slides, cap at eight: cover, six boxes, eval bar, pack table, pushback one-pager, 90-day placeholder, spare. If you use a doc, use headings that match the file names. If you use a notes app, pin the cover. The tool does not matter. The path matters. Pick the tool you can operate while nervous. New tools tomorrow are a bad idea. Nervous hands need old tools.

Do a five-second find test for each live artifact: close everything, start a timer, open the wiki design, open the pack table, open the talk tracks. If any find is over five seconds, rename or pin. This is the same test you would run on a runbook before a SEV. The walkthrough is not a SEV, but your nervous system will treat it like one. Design for that.

If you will send the pack as a take-home, export a PDF of cover + wiki design + table + resume top third. Do not send talk tracks (those are for your mouth) and do not send the whole month of notes. A 6–10 page PDF is sendable. A 40-page dump is not. Write a two-line README at the top of the PDF: who you are, what is independent, what you want them to look at first. That README is the cover, again. Redundancy is fine. Confusion is not.

Stop assembling when the path works and the holes are labeled. You will want to rewrite the wiki design. Do not, unless the job sentence is still a slogan. Rewrites tonight steal runs tomorrow. Tomorrow needs a stable object. Freeze the pack like you freeze scope. Note leftover rewrites on the hole page as "cosmetic — after day 29." Then outline the twelve minutes and walk away.

Minute-by-minute, written today, spoken tomorrow. 0:00–1:30 intro (the 90-second clip from day 26). 1:30–7:30 demo story (day 23 clocks inside this window). 7:30–11:30 operating pack (compressed steering: slice one breath, eval, cost, top risk, ask). 11:30–12:00 tease the 90-day plan and stop. If you overflow, you cut from How, not from eval, kill, or honesty. Write the clocks in the margin of the outline. Tomorrow you honor them.

The outline is headings plus the first sentence of each beat, not the full prose. Full prose tonight becomes a read-aloud tomorrow, and read-alouds fail. You need bullets you can see while standing. Example beat: "Problem 60s — Atlas PMs, SOP-14, Slack workaround." That is an outline line. A paragraph under it is a script, and the script belongs tomorrow after Run 1.

Mark the two diagrams you will draw: six boxes in the demo window, nothing in the pack window unless they ask. Mark the honesty sentence at the start of How. Mark the ask at 11:30. Those three marks are how you do not forget the scoring under adrenaline. If your outline does not show them, add them. An outline without the honesty sentence is how you "forget" it when the room is friendly.

Do not add a seventh section ("and here is my vision for agents"). Vision is how you blow the clock and look junior. If they want vision they will ask, and you will give v1.5 as one read tool, or a second slice, or a kill. That is vision enough for twelve minutes. Platform vision lives in pushback B, which lives in Q&A, which lives after minute 12.

If your primary is transformation, you may flip the middle: four minutes of pack, then a shorter demo if they lean in. Note the flip on the outline as a variant, not as a rewrite of the whole pack. If your primary is FDE, keep demo first. If you do not know, keep the default order — demo then pack — because it matches day 29's likely eight, which start technical and then go political.

Read the outline once out loud. If it already exceeds twelve minutes as headings, it will explode as speech. Cut a beat. The 90-day tease can be one sentence: "I have a 30/60/90 I can send; first 30 is listen, golden set, one named owner." Then stop. Tomorrow you will run it twice. Tonight you freeze the outline and the folder. That is assembly. Assembly that keeps going is just anxiety with a file browser.

Tick an artifact when it is truly done or honestly labeled, not when the day number says so. Prompt library: tick if two prompts exist and are dated. Wiki design: tick if the job sentence is specific and the six boxes are on a page. Charter/pack: tick if the table has owners and an ask. Resume: tick if the primary is in line 1. Walkthrough: do not tick until tomorrow after Run 2. 90-day: do not tick until day 30. False ticks make the last two days feel optional. They are not optional.

You may never send the pack. Many loops will never ask. You still assemble it, because you will speak from it, and because one take-home will ask, and because internal mobility often asks for "materials." A pack that exists is a tool. A pack that exists only in your head is a wish. You would not run a program off a wish. Do not run a search off one.

If you send, send the PDF of cover + design + table + resume, plus a two-line note on what is independent. Do not send talk tracks. Do not send this academy's text. Do not send someone else's template with your name. The send is a professional object. Treat it like a steering paper: version, date, owner (you).

If you do not send, still export the PDF tonight so it exists. File names change, notes apps sync badly, and day 29 you should not be exporting. Export is part of assembly. Put the PDF next to the folder. Tomorrow you speak. You should not also be the print shop.

Tell one human that the pack exists. A message: "I have a 12-minute walkthrough of an AI slice and a charter. Can I do it to you once this week for time?" That human is not a hiring manager. They are a timer with a face. If you cannot find a human, day 29 still happens, standing, to a wall. The ask tonight is to make the social version possible. Isolation is how walkthroughs stay theoretical.

Close the day with a directory listing in your notes: the files, the holes, the outline clocks. Then stop. You will want to keep assembling. That want is fear. Fear tonight is useful if it labeled holes. It is not useful if it rewrites a paragraph for the fourth time. Go rest. Tomorrow is the performance, and performances need sleep more than they need a prettier cover.

If you cannot screenshare tomorrow (no video loop booked), still assemble as if you could. A take-home will ask you to send something. An internal mobility conversation will ask "can you send what you have." A friend who agrees to time you will need a folder, not a speech from memory plus a junk drawer. The pack is the product. The walkthrough is how you demonstrate the product. Products that only live in your mouth disappear when you are tired. File them.