AI Engineering from Scratch Phase 19 Introduction
AI Engineering from Scratch
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Phase 19: Capstone Projects

Phase 19: Capstone Projects

> Prove everything you learned. Build portfolio-grade systems.

Start this phase on GitHub

Prerequisites: Choose a project whose listed phases you have completed.
The Terminal-Native Coding Agent expects Phases 11, 13, 14, 15, and 17.

Starter project: Terminal-Native Coding Agent

Run this command from the repository root:

python3 phases/19-capstone-projects/01-terminal-native-coding-agent/code/main.py

Keep the command, exit code, final plan state, budget totals, trace events, and
the architecture decision you would change before connecting a real model.

Next action: Select the capstone that matches your goal from the
full Phase 19 project list. Projects are choices,
not a required numeric sequence. Write acceptance evidence before building.

Use the cross-phase roadmap to close any prerequisite gaps.

Lessons in this phase

  • Capstone 01 — Terminal-Native Coding Agent
  • Capstone 02 — RAG over Codebase (Cross-Repo Semantic Search)
  • Capstone 03 — Real-Time Voice Assistant (ASR to LLM to TTS)
  • Capstone 04 — Multimodal Document QA (Vision-First PDF, Tables, Charts)
  • Capstone 05 — Autonomous Research Agent (AI-Scientist Class)
  • Capstone 06 — DevOps Troubleshooting Agent for Kubernetes
  • Capstone 07 — End-to-End Fine-Tuning Pipeline (Data to SFT to DPO to Serve)
  • Capstone 08 — Production RAG Chatbot for a Regulated Vertical
  • Capstone 09 — Code Migration Agent (Repo-Level Language / Runtime Upgrade)
  • Capstone 10 — Multi-Agent Software Engineering Team
  • Capstone 11 — LLM Observability & Eval Dashboard
  • Capstone 12 — Video Understanding Pipeline (Scene, QA, Search)
  • Capstone 13: Stateless MCP Server with Registry and Governance
  • Capstone 14 — Speculative-Decoding Inference Server
  • Capstone 15 — Constitutional Safety Harness + Red-Team Range
  • Capstone 16 — GitHub Issue-to-PR Autonomous Agent
  • Capstone 17 — Personal AI Tutor (Adaptive, Multimodal, with Memory)
  • Agent Harness Loop Contract
  • Tool Registry with Schema Validation
  • JSON-RPC 2.0 Over Newline-Delimited Stdio
  • Function Call Dispatcher
  • Plan-Execute Control Flow
  • Capstone Lesson 25: Verification Gates and the Observation Budget
  • Capstone Lesson 26: Sandbox Runner with Denylist and Path Jail
  • Capstone Lesson 27: Eval Harness with Fixture Tasks
  • Capstone Lesson 28: Observability with OTel GenAI Spans and Prometheus Metrics
  • Capstone Lesson 29: End-to-End Coding Agent on the Harness
  • BPE Tokenizer From Scratch
  • Tokenized Dataset with Sliding Window
  • Token and Positional Embeddings
  • Multi-Head Self-Attention
  • Transformer Block from Scratch
  • GPT Model Assembly
  • Training Loop and Evaluation
  • Loading Pretrained Weights
  • Capstone Lesson 38: Classifier Fine-Tuning by Head Swap
  • Capstone Lesson 39: Instruction Tuning by Supervised Fine-Tuning
  • Capstone Lesson 40: Direct Preference Optimization from Scratch
  • Capstone Lesson 41: Full Evaluation Pipeline
  • Large Corpus Downloader
  • HDF5 Tokenized Corpus
  • Cosine LR with Linear Warmup
  • Gradient Clipping and Mixed Precision
  • Gradient Accumulation
  • Checkpoint Save and Resume
  • Distributed Data Parallel and FSDP from Scratch
  • Language Model Evaluation Harness
  • Hypothesis Generator
  • Literature Retrieval
  • Experiment Runner
  • Result Evaluator
  • Paper Writer
  • Critic Loop
  • Iteration Scheduler
  • End-to-End Research Demo
  • Vision Encoder Patches
  • Vision Transformer Encoder
  • Projection Layer for Modality Alignment
  • Cross-Attention Fusion
  • Vision-Language Pretraining
  • Multimodal Evaluation
  • Chunking Strategies, Compared
  • Hybrid Retrieval with BM25 and Dense Embeddings
  • Cross-Encoder Reranker
  • Query Rewriting: HyDE, Multi-Query, and Decomposition
  • RAG Evaluation: Precision, Recall, MRR, nDCG, Faithfulness, Answer Relevance
  • End-to-End RAG System
  • Task Spec Format
  • Classical Metrics
  • Code Exec Metric
  • Perplexity and Calibration
  • Leaderboard Aggregation
  • End-to-End Eval Runner
  • Collective Ops From Scratch
  • Data Parallel DDP From Scratch
  • ZeRO Optimizer State Sharding
  • Pipeline Parallel and Bubble Analysis
  • Sharded Checkpoint and Atomic Resume
  • End-to-End Distributed Training
  • Capstone 82 — Jailbreak Taxonomy
  • Capstone 83 — Prompt Injection Detector
  • Capstone 84 — Refusal Evaluation
  • Capstone 85 — Content Classifier Integration
  • Capstone 86 — Constitutional Rules Engine
  • Capstone 87 — End-to-End Safety Gate
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