Stage 2 · Lesson 7 of 7
Build the app you will defend and test
The best practice target is an app you built and own. Run a small open model on your own machine with , or use a hosted with a spending limit set first. Build a little support assistant around it: a , a few documents of your own for retrieval, and two harmless tools, such as looking up a fake order and drafting a fake email.
Keep it on your machine, not the public internet. Now you can see every prompt, chunk and tool call, and testing costs little. Every later stage adds to it: defences on the builder's side, test suites on the tester's side. Keep it in Git from day one so your portfolio shows the history.
Common trappractising on a company's live chatbot, which is unauthorised testing whatever your intent.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking Prompt Engineering for Software Engineers
Design Gurus · Beginner · Subscription
How system prompts, context and structured output really work, the ground every LLM risk stands on
- CourseFreeHugging Face Learn
Hugging Face · Intermediate
Free courses on how language models, embeddings and agents work, at an engineer's level