SESSION 6 · ~60M
Pick & scope your build
Choose a problem sized to four hours and write the done-criteria before anything else — scope is what makes a capstone shippable.
The capstone starts not with building but with choosing. Pick a problem you can credibly finish in four hours and write down exactly what 'done' looks like before you touch a prompt. Scope, not skill, is what separates projects that ship from projects that drift.
What makes a good capstone
- Useful — solves a real, recurring problem you actually have (a calculator, a summary tool, a small dashboard).
- Bounded — fits in roughly 4 hours: one core feature, not a platform.
- Verifiable — you can state a done-criterion you can test (given X input, output equals Y).
- Shippable — can be deployed as a static tool you can share by URL.
Resist scope creep's gravitational pull. Every idea will sprout 'wouldn't it also be nice if' features. Write the done-criteria first, and treat every addition during the build as a candidate for the next version, not this version.
Parkinson's law is the capstone's governing constraint: work expands to fill the time you give it. A fixed four-hour budget with written done-criteria forces the scope that ships; an open-ended project never converges. The deadline is a feature, not a constraint.
Write the done-criteria as a checklist: the specific inputs, the specific output, the one test it must pass, the one deployment step that makes it shareable. If you can't write that checklist, the scope is still too vague — tighten it before building.
TRY IT
Draft your capstone in one paragraph: the problem, the user (you), the core input and output, and three done-criteria as a checklist. Do not build yet — a crisp paragraph here saves hours of drift later.
CHECK YOUR UNDERSTANDING
What principle does the module say governs capstone scope?
What are the four qualities of a good capstone project?
How should you handle new feature ideas that arise during the build?
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