Week 10 · Thursday · AI Lab
Your proposal said what you would build. Now create the plan for how you build it. By the end of today, your team has a project plan you can start executing next week.
This lab has five steps. You will spend most of class working in the Team Workspace tab above. The workspace walks you through each step, saves your work, and generates prompts for you. Read the overview below first (3 minutes), then switch to the Team Workspace tab and go.
Your proposal described what you would build and why. A proposal is not a project plan. A proposal says "we will build an AI-powered grant research tool." A project plan says "Task 1: build the keyword extraction prompt. Inputs: sample grant listing. Acceptance criteria: extracts at least 5 relevant keywords. Estimated time: 2 hours."
Today you create that project plan: interview, generate, audit. All four team members work in parallel. The plan you leave with today is the one you start executing next week.
"Do not start by listing features. Give AI a one-sentence description of what you are building. Let it ask you questions. Five minutes of back and forth gives AI more clarity than a two-page spec."
This lab is designed so all four team members are productive at the same time. Some steps are individual (everyone works in parallel with their own AI conversation). Some steps are team (you come together to merge and decide).
| Time | Step | Mode |
|---|---|---|
| 3:30 - 3:35 | Step 1: Align on scope | Team (5 min) |
| 3:35 - 3:55 | Step 2: AI interviews | Individual parallel (20 min) |
| 3:55 - 4:10 | Step 3: Council review and merge | Team (15 min) |
| 4:10 - 4:25 | Step 4: Parallel audit | Individual parallel (15 min) |
| 4:25 - 4:40 | Step 5: Finalize and commit | Team (15 min) |
| 4:40 - 4:45 | Buffer | Catch up or push to GitHub (5 min) |
Everything below is reference. The workspace walks you through each step.
Team, 5 minutes. Before anyone opens an AI tool, answer three questions together:
Write these answers down. You will use them in Step 2.
Individual, 20 minutes. All team members work in parallel.
Each person opens their own AI conversation. Give it a one-sentence description of what your team is building. Then let AI interview you. Each team member takes a different angle:
Focus on technical implementation. What tools, what architecture, what connects to what.
Focus on the partner's needs. What would make them say "this is useful"?
Focus on what could go wrong. What are the risks? Where does the plan break?
Focus on what is in and what is out. What is the MVP vs. the full vision?
Starting Prompt (same for everyone, then diverge by role)
I have attached our project proposal document and presentation slides. Read them first.
My team is building [one sentence describing your project] for [partner name]. We have [X weeks] left to build and deliver.
Interview me so we can create a detailed project plan. Ask me one question at a time. Wait for my answer before asking the next question. After 8-10 questions, generate a project plan with:
I am focusing on the [builder / partner needs / risks / scope] angle. Ask me questions from that perspective.
When you generate the plan, save it as an artifact called plan-interview-[your first name].md. Include a summary of the questions you asked and my answers at the top, followed by the full project plan.
Team, 15 minutes. Come back together. Each person shares the best question AI asked that you did not expect and the project plan AI generated.
This step has two phases. First, AI evaluates all the interview plans as a council of expert reviewers. Then your team reviews the council's recommendations and creates the unified plan.
Phase A: Council Review
One person pastes all interview plans into Claude with the council review prompt. AI spawns four reviewer agents that independently evaluate every task as KEEP, MODIFY, or CUT with justification.
Council Review Prompt
Here are project plans generated from different perspectives on the same project: technical build, partner needs, risks, and scope.
[Paste all plans here, or upload the plan artifacts generated by each student]
Act as a council of expert reviewers. Spawn the following agents and have each one independently evaluate the plans:
For every task or subtask that appears in any plan, the council must decide: KEEP, MODIFY, or CUT. For each decision, provide:
Output the result as a structured evaluation. Save it as an artifact called council-evaluation.md. Do NOT produce a merged plan yet. Just produce the council's recommendations. My team will review these and make the final decisions.
Phase B: Team Review and Unified Plan
Read the council's evaluation together. Go through each recommendation. Agree or push back. Then tell AI to generate the final unified plan based on your decisions.
Unify Prompt
Here is the council evaluation of our project plans:
[Paste the council evaluation]
Our team has reviewed the recommendations. Here are our decisions: [list any disagreements or overrides]
Now generate a unified project-plan.md that incorporates these decisions. For each task include: task name, subtasks, dependencies, acceptance criteria, time estimate, and owner. Organize by build order. Format with checkboxes. Save it as an artifact called project-plan.md.
Individual, 20 minutes. All team members work in parallel.
Take the unified project plan from Step 3 and audit it from different angles:
What did we forget? What happens between tasks that nobody accounted for?
Is the build order right? Are there tasks marked sequential that could run in parallel?
For each acceptance criterion: could an outside observer tell if you hit it?
Is any task bigger than it looks? What can we cut without losing core value?
Audit Prompt (adjust the focus line for your role)
Act as a senior project reviewer. Here is our project plan for an AI tool we are building for [partner name].
[Paste the unified project plan from Step 3, or upload the project-plan.md artifact]
Audit this plan for [missing tasks / wrong dependencies / vague acceptance criteria / scope creep]. Be specific. For each issue you find, name the task, explain the problem, and suggest a fix.
Do not rewrite the plan. Just list the problems and fixes. Save it as an artifact called audit-[your focus]-[your first name].md.
Team, 15 minutes. Come back together. Each person shares their audit findings. Go through the issues one by one: accept the fix and update the plan, or disagree and explain why.
Save as project-plan.md. One person downloads the team files ZIP from the workspace and uploads project-plan.md to your team's GitHub repo. Before you push, for each of the first three tasks, answer:
If you cannot answer all three for every task, the plan is not specific enough.
The plan you leave with today is the one you start executing between now and next week. This is not a document you submit and forget. Open it tomorrow and start building.
Next Thursday's hands-on session is about removing blockers. You will come in with your plan open, show what you have built so far, and surface the issues, roadblocks, and challenges you ran into while executing it. We will work through those together in class.
| Criteria | Points | What I am looking for |
|---|---|---|
| AI Interview | 25 | You ran a real interview from your assigned role. The plan AI generated reflects that perspective, not a generic copy-paste. |
| Audit | 20 | You ran a real audit from your assigned lens. Findings are specific (name the task, name the problem, suggest a fix). |
| Final Plan Quality | 35 | Tasks have subtasks, dependencies, acceptance criteria, owners, and time estimates. Build order makes sense. A new team member could read this and know what to build first. |
| Participation and Reflection | 20 | Timestamps show you contributed during the lab. Your two-paragraph reflection is honest and specific about what worked and what did not in this lab format. Generic or AI-written reflections score lower. |
Instructor Example
A model project plan created for the fictional Sunrise Community Kitchen partner. Study the structure: specific tasks, testable criteria, clear dependencies, realistic estimates.
Note from Professor Meirelles: This is a 5-week plan for a fictional four-person team. It is intentionally thorough to show you what a professional-grade plan looks like. Your plan today will be simpler. Focus on the structure (test cases, acceptance criteria, dependencies, owners) not the length. A plan with 4-6 well-defined tasks is better than a plan with 15 vague ones.
Build an AI-powered tool that processes the weekly food bank manifest, generates a distribution plan respecting dietary restrictions and household sizes, and produces a post-distribution report. Reduce Maria's weekly coordination time from 6-8 hours to under 2 hours. Deliver a working prototype by Week 14 partner demo.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Partner | Sunrise Community Kitchen (Maria Sandoval) |
| Timeline | Week 10 through Week 14 (5 weeks) |
| Demo Date | Week 14, Thursday, December 4 |
| Core Metric | Time to produce distribution plan drops from 3+ hours to under 30 minutes |
| Week | Tasks | Milestone | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Task 1 (data collection + ground truth) | All sample data in repo. Ground truth manifest categorized. Synthetic edge cases created. | 3 |
| 11 | Tasks 2, 3 (parser + allocator) | Both core prompts pass all test cases on all sample data. Maria reviews allocation output. | 13 |
| 12 | Tasks 4, 5 (email gen + report gen) | All four prompts working independently. Maria reviews volunteer email for tone. Partner checkpoint call. | 11 |
| 13 | Task 6 (integration + pipeline) | Full pipeline runs end-to-end. Under 30 minutes. All integration tests pass. | 6 |
| 14 | Tasks 7, 8 (partner test + handoff) | Maria runs pipeline herself. All must-fix issues resolved. Handoff package delivered. Repo organized. | 11 |
Total estimated hours: 44 across 4 team members over 5 weeks = ~2.2 hours per person per week. Realistic for a course project.
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manifest PDFs are scanned images, not selectable text | Medium | High (breaks Task 2 input) | Test in Task 2.1. If scanned: fall back to manual text copy-paste. Add OCR as stretch goal. Document limitation in handoff. |
| Maria is slow to respond to data requests | High | Medium (delays Task 1) | Send request Friday Oct 31. Follow up Monday. If no response by Wednesday: create synthetic data and proceed. Real data can replace synthetic later. |
| Prompt length limits hit on large manifests (400+ items) | Medium | Medium (parser fails on real-size input) | INT-TEST D catches this. Mitigation: split manifest into chunks, process each chunk, merge results. Add chunking logic to pipeline. |
| Allocation rules are more complex than documented | Medium | Medium (Task 3 output is wrong) | Partner checkpoint in Week 12 catches this early. Build rules as configurable list, not hardcoded, so Maria can adjust. |
| Maria's tone is hard to replicate | Medium | Low (email needs heavy editing) | Task 4.9 catches this. If AI cannot match tone: generate content only, let Maria write the personal parts. Good enough is better than perfect. |
| Team member unavailable for a week | Low | High (delays a phase) | Each task has a single owner but all prompts are documented. Any team member can pick up any task. Pipeline doc (Task 6.9) ensures continuity. |
| Integration breaks when chaining prompts | High | Medium (pipeline does not flow) | Data contracts defined in Task 6.1 before building connector. Each stage saves output to file. Failures are isolated, not cascading. |
SE 395-2: AI Tools for Social Impact | Rollins College | Fall 2026
Live Workspace
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