Lab C4

The Overdue-Loan Batch Desk

~5h · groups · today's capstone

25 accounts. One afternoon. One instruction that has to work every single time.

C4 Friday 4pm — weekly overdue-loan reminders

The Overdue-Loan Batch Desk

You're on the collections desk this week, and the Friday overdue-loan report just landed in your inbox.

It's Friday, 4pm. The week's overdue-loan report just landed — 25 accounts, ranging from a few days late to well past due. Every one of them needs a first-reminder note before you can close out the week, and none of them should read like a form letter.

In Week 1 you learned to write one great prompt for one task. That's fine when there's one email to draft. It falls apart at 25 — nobody has time to open each file, reread the loan, and hand-write a note per customer, and a copy-pasted single template either sounds cold on a 7-day-late account or dangerously soft on a 90-day one.

Today your team builds the version that runs across the whole batch: a tiered prompt library, an agent that applies the right tone to each row, a guardrail on what it's allowed to touch, and a validation pass that catches it if it gets something wrong — before anything reaches a customer.

By the end of the day your group has triaged this batch, built and tested the prompts, wired up a running agent against the fictional dataset (with a stretch option to demo it live on your own personal account), validated a sample against the source sheet, written your Agent Card, and presented all of it.

Team name ⬇ Download dataset — 25 fictional overdue-loan accounts — Burgan Cornerstone training data

Time budget (guide, not a clock): Triage 25m · Safety pass 20m · Prompt library 30m · Agent design 30m · Wave 2 (lunch) 40m · Validation log 40m · Agent Card 20m · Present 45m — roughly 4.2h of real work, including the Wave 2 curveball that lands at lunch. The model answers in seconds — almost none of this time is spent waiting on AI. It's spent deciding, checking, and building.

👥 How to split this: Work this as a full group. The judgment calls are the point — don't split it up and merge answers, argue them out together.

Triage this scenario's work

For each task below, pick the task shape and the risk level, then write the reusable reason — the part your future self (or a teammate covering this desk) actually re-reads.

Task	Shape	Risk	Why (one line)
Draft a first-reminder note for a 7-13-day-overdue account Lowest severity in this batch — tone matters most here.
Draft a firmer reminder for an account overdue 21+ days
Decide which severity tier each of the 25 accounts falls into This is the sorting step everything else depends on.
Summarize this week's overdue batch into a one-paragraph note for your branch manager
Extract the branch, contact phone, and overdue amount for every account so the agent has clean inputs
Decide whether a specific account should go to collections instead of getting an automated reminder
Draft two or three subject-line variants so reminders don't all look identical to customers
Reason about whether a reminder should mention the prior-reminder count in its tone, or leave it out
Flag accounts where prior_reminders_sent looks inconsistent with days_overdue, for manual review before the batch runs Don't run these through the standard template yet.