Session 1 Slides: The AI-Native Workspace

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Session 1

The AI-Native Workspace

AI Product Engineering

Building Intelligent Applications with Modern AI

Block 1: Foundations & The Exocortex | 2 Hours

The Old World

Building AI required expensive GPUs, specialised teams, and years of training.

  • Computer vision project: weeks of GPU time + PhD team
  • Recommendation engine: data scientists + ML engineers + infra
  • Chatbot: NLP experts + labelled training data

That world no longer exists for most practitioners.

The New World

Foundation models are accessible via a simple API call.

Send text (or image, audio, document)
Model runs on infrastructure you never touch
Receive sophisticated, structured response
Pay per use — not for the hardware

Three Levels of AI Interaction

LevelExampleResult
Consumer"Give me a recipe"One answer, conversation ends
Prompt Writer"Act as a chef and…"Better answer, still one-shot
Engineering PartnerIterative: define → generate → evaluate → revise → testWorking software

This course operates at Level 3.

THINK → KNOW → BUILD → CONNECT → EQUIP → EVALUATE → SHIP

🧠 THINK — Explore problems with AI

📚 KNOW — Build your knowledge base

🔨 BUILD — Scaffold with AI coding partner

🔌 CONNECT — Wire to cloud AI APIs

🛠️ EQUIP — Add tools & agentic workflows

🧪 EVALUATE — Test for failures

🚀 SHIP — Deliver working prototype

Lab: Set Up Your Workspace

  1. GitHub Copilot — VS Code extension, student licence
  2. Google AI Studio — aistudio.google.com → get API key
  3. Verify: open a .py file, Copilot suggests code

Store your API key safely. You will use it from Session 7 onwards.

Define Your AI Product Idea

You will build one project across all 15 sessions.

QuestionAnswer
ProblemWhat specific issue does it solve?
UserWho uses it? (Be specific)
AI RoleWhat does the AI specifically do?
Success MetricHow do you know it works?

Session 1 Summary

  • Cloud AI = foundation model capability via API call
  • AI as engineering partner, not search engine
  • Framework: THINK → KNOW → BUILD → CONNECT → EQUIP → EVALUATE → SHIP
  • You have a product idea, a workspace, and an API key

Next Session: Prompting & Structured Outputs