Explain your project the way a system design interview would

You built something real, and when someone asks you to walk through the architecture out loud, you freeze.

IntermediateRead 3 minDoing: a couple of hours7 steps

▶ Start

What you'll have at the end

A one-page write-up naming your architecture, the tradeoffs you made, and the numbers behind them

Before you start

You need

A working AI application you built - retrieval over your own data at minimum, ideally with at least one tool call - plus whatever latency or request-volume numbers you've already logged for it.

Not covered

Answering a from-scratch 'design X' prompt with no project of your own behind it, or generic behavioral questions unrelated to your architecture.

Leans on

7 steps

Where to go next

Teach your agent to escalate to a human

if you haven't built the retry-then-refuse recovery path yet, build it there before you narrate it here

Work out your app's cost per request before you build the rest

brings a real cost-per-request figure into your numbers table alongside the latency ones

Checked 15 Aug 2026

Part of the AI Engineering cookbook