DEV-502 Development

AI-Native Application Engineering Capstone

For teams who already deliver production services to the DEV-501 standard, this capstone adds what is new. Build and defend a production-grade application in which AI appears in both the product and the process. Teams deliver with assistant support under full review discipline, ship an AI feature with grounding, guardrails and an offline evaluation harness wired into CI, and instrument the system against explicit cost and latency budgets. The programme closes with a panel defence where every architectural trade-off, metric and known gap must be argued.

B5Advanced

6modules

42skill atoms

4role journeys

Curriculum

What this course covers.

6 modules, 42 named skill atoms. Expand any module to see them.

1Architecture & Delivery Plan7 skill atoms

scope negotiation and cut linesservice boundaries and data modelbuild vs model-call decisionsnon-functional budgets agreed upfrontrisk register and timeboxed spikesdelivery plan with review checkpointsarchitecture decision records

2Assistant-Supported Delivery7 skill atoms

spec-first generation loopsmall reviewable diffsevery generated line reviewed by a named humanprovenance noted in commit trailerssecret hygiene in prompts and contextreview rotation across the teamvelocity and rework measured throughout

3The AI Feature: Build & Guardrails7 skill atoms

retrieval grounded in application dataprompt and tool designstructured output validation and repairrefusal and deterministic fallback pathsprompt injection defencesPII redaction before the model callhuman-in-the-loop escalation

4Evaluation & Regression Control7 skill atoms

golden dataset constructionoffline eval harness running in CILLM as judge calibrated against human labelsregression run on every prompt or model changegroundedness and hallucination scoringshadow and canary trafficautomatic rollback on eval regression

5Tests, Observability & Budgets7 skill atoms

unit contract and end-to-end layerstrace and span instrumentationtoken cost tracked per requestp95 latency budget with alertingcache hit rate and semantic cachingSLO and error budget definitionload testing against model rate limits

6Panel Defence7 skill atoms

architecture walkthrough under questioningdefending build vs buy trade-offsevidence of review disciplinelive failure mode demonstrationcost and latency numbers defendedknown gaps stated honestlyhandover runbook and documentation

Where it fits

DEV-502 in the role journeys.

This course appears in 4 of our 45 role journeys. Here is what a learner takes immediately before and after it in each.

Software Engineer (AI-era)

Capstone stage

AI-507→DEV-502→journey complete

Full-Stack Developer

Capstone stage

CL-324→DEV-502→journey complete

Frontend Engineer

Capstone stage

DEV-224→DEV-502→journey complete

Mobile Developer

Capstone stage

DEV-303→DEV-502→journey complete

Roles this course serves

Frontend Engineer Full-Stack Developer Mobile Developer Software Engineer (AI-era)

The capability ladder

This course is authored to band B5.

Every course we run is written to one rung of the CASI ladder, so a plan can be assembled to take a team from where they are to where they need to be.

What do B1–B6 mean?The CASI Capability Ladder — click to expand

Every course targets a band on the CASI Capability Ladder — our six-band proficiency scale, anchored to open standards (O*NET, ESCO, NICE, NIST AI RMF, Bloom's). A band tells you how deep a course goes, and what evidence proves it.

What the learner can doTypical evidence

AwareUnderstands concepts and vocabulary; uses tools with guidance

Knowledge checks

FoundationPerforms standard tasks correctly in familiar contexts

Guided labs, autograded exercises

PractitionerDelivers complete pieces of work independently

Scenario labs, proctored hands-on exams

ProfessionalHandles production-grade complexity, trade-offs and failure modes

Break-fix drills, design defenses

AdvancedEngineers systems end-to-end under constraints; leads others

Rubric-scored capstones, vivas

ExpertSets direction; recognised authority across teams

Portfolio + panel evaluation

A note on B6. Courses in this catalog target B1–B5. B6 is not taught — it is recognised, through a portfolio and a panel, once someone is setting direction for others. Every journey here is built to land a learner at B5.

Other Development courses at this level.

DEV-501

Run DEV-502 for your team.

This course runs at several lengths depending on how deep you need to go and how much of it your people already have. Tell us who is being trained and we will scope it.

Add it to a training plan Talk to our team Check your team’s level free

AI-Native Application Engineering Capstone

What this course covers.

DEV-502 in the role journeys.

Software Engineer (AI-era)

Full-Stack Developer

Frontend Engineer

Mobile Developer

Roles this course serves

This course is authored to band B5.

Other Development courses at this level.

Enterprise Application Engineering Capstone

Advanced Java: Concurrency, JVM & Performance

Java Microservices with Spring Cloud

Software Architecture & Design Patterns

Advanced React & Frontend Architecture

Node.js Backend Engineering at Scale

Run DEV-502 for your team.