Assemble the output contract of your feature
The final workshop gathers the course's decisions into a single document: the output contract for one feature of your product, ready for engineers to review. You assess it yourself against a checklist, then plan how to put it into practice over the next 7 and 30 days.
Lesson objective
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to assemble the full output contract of a feature in your product (consumers, mechanism, schema, validation, exceptions, version, 20 cases and thresholds), self-assess it and plan how to apply it over 7 and 30 days.
Topics covered
- output contract
- workshop
- exit kit
- action plan
Where it fits
Your output contract
How do I assemble the output contract of a feature in my product and apply it over the next 30 days?
Lessons in this module
- Assemble the output contract of your feature (this lesson)
What you will learn in this module
This lesson is part of the course Get reliable, product-ready AI outputs (JSON, schemas, function calling)
- Diagnose where free-text output breaks a feature and decide which outputs require a contract.
- Choose between instructions alone, JSON mode, structured outputs and function calling for a given need, and justify the choice.
- Design an output schema (types, enums, required fields, nullable fields, descriptions, "unknown" values) where every field serves a consumer.
- Specify validation (syntax, schema, business rules), retries, handling of refusals and truncation, and the fallback path.
- Version and evolve an output contract without breaking its consumers, accounting for provider differences and the split of roles between PM and developers.
- Build a set of 20 robustness cases and set acceptance thresholds before going to production.
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