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Week 12 · Field delivery

Defend the capstone

0:00 / 3:00

15 seconds

"Walk me through it."

The panel wants judgment, not a feature tour.

DecisionWhat you choseTrade-offWhat you gave upFailureWhat you fixed
Lesson notesDefend the capstone: the short version+

Week 12 · Delivery & handover · about 3 minutes

What you will be able to do

Defend the Helix capstone with one decision, one trade-off, and one failure you learned from.

The idea

Prepare three beats: a decision you owned, a trade-off you accepted, a failure you caught and fixed.

Screenshots without judgment fail the defense.

Decision: ACL before retrieval
Trade-off: slightly lower recall vs zero forbidden leaks
Failure: injection via PDF — fixed with data delimiters + eval

They grade how you think under constraints.

Key takeaways

  • One decision.
  • One trade-off.
  • One failure and fix.

Part of the Forward Deployed Engineer roadmap. New to the role? Start with what a Forward Deployed Engineer does.