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Chapter 13 checkpoint

You've reached the end of the AI decisions chapter. These rules are the most-leveraged ideas in the whole guide — if you internalize even half of them, you'll avoid most of the failures that derail AI features.

There are 14 questions in the bank — each visit picks 5 at random, so retaking gives you different ones. If you miss one, the result card links directly to the page that explains the rule.

You must pass (≥ 60%) to unlock the Next button and Chapter 14 in the sidebar.

Required checkpoint

AI decisions checkpoint

Pass to unlock the Next button below

The meta-rules​

If you remember nothing else:

  • Boring beats exciting. Especially in AI, where "exciting" is yesterday's launch.
  • Cheap-to-reverse beats committal. Walk the ladder up, not down.
  • Simple beats complex. Chains before agents. Prompts before fine-tunes. Buy before build.
  • Evals beat vibes. No measurement = no shipping decision.
  • Kill switch beats faith. Every production AI feature must be turn-off-able in seconds.
  • Restraint beats ambition. The single biggest predictor of AI engineering success is refusing complexity until the simple version has provably failed.

What's next​

→ Continue to Chapter 14: Production Patterns — the patterns that turn a "works on my laptop" AI feature into one that runs reliably at scale.