# Creator Workbench

**A two-day architecture lab.** Crisis Cat brings the product vision. Wicked Spooky brings the cloud design. Together, they turn an ambitious one-person social media team into a buildable, measurable AWS specification.

## The cast and the commission

**Crisis Cat — product designer and client.** Crisis Cat has designed the Creator Workbench: research, content, publishing, community, attribution, and a daily brief. The business starts with almost no money but expects thousands of subscribers if its marketing takes off.

**Wicked Spooky — the solution architect.** Wicked Spooky IT, also known as Second Act Sam, brings 30 years of IT experience and is studying AWS SAA-C03. In this scenario, Wicked Spooky takes responsibility for specifying the AWS environment Crisis Cat needs. “SAA” describes the architect's role and learning objective; it does not assert that the exam has already been passed.

WickedSpookyIT.com hosts this training case study. Wicked Spooky IT provides the architecture and delivery expertise. The target product is Crisis Cat’s Creator Workbench at `creator.wickedspooky.ai`, a separate application outcome. These pages discuss and design that outcome; they do not provision it.

## Two days, one mission

| Lesson | The question | The design artifact |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [Day 1 — The Creator Workbench](day-1.md) | What must the product do, and what is the simplest useful architecture? | Module specifications, human approval rules, local AI strategy, and Mermaid user journey |
| [Day 2 — Wicked Spooky's architecture review](day-2.md) | How do we deliver safely on today's budget and survive tomorrow's growth? | AWS feature review, alternatives, subscription guardrails, SAA mapping, and fail-forward plan |

## Our product design method

We apply the method already defined on [iLab](https://ilab.wickedspooky.ai/): **Discover → Plan → Execute → Certify → Impact**. Governed Discovery clarifies intent and evidence. AI-Augmented Insight helps us examine choices. Certified Execution checks work against agreed requirements. Continuous Learning records failures and repairs. Trusted Impact connects measured outcomes to the original goal.

| Stage | What it means in this lab | Evidence we will retain |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Discover | Translate Crisis Cat's pitch into requirements, constraints, unknowns, and authority | Product brief and prerequisite ledger |
| Plan | Compare architectures, assign ownership, and select the smallest credible design | Diagrams, decisions, cost model and acceptance criteria |
| Execute | Build bounded experiments when implementation labs begin | Versioned changes and reproducible test inputs |
| Certify | Verify approvals, tenant isolation, failure behavior, recovery and unit economics | Actual results, traces, cost measurements and restore records |
| Impact | Compare revenue, cost and useful outcomes; feed lessons into the next iteration | Daily brief, margin trend and fail-forward findings |

Method references: [Discover](https://ilab.wickedspooky.ai/discover.html), [Plan](https://ilab.wickedspooky.ai/plan.html), [Execute](https://ilab.wickedspooky.ai/execute.html), [Certify](https://ilab.wickedspooky.ai/certify.html), [Impact](https://ilab.wickedspooky.ai/impact.html). Here, Certify means internal acceptance; it does not mean third-party accreditation.

## How to read the case study

Architecture choices are narrated as completed **design decisions** so this can guide a build from scratch. Resources, integrations, incidents and performance results are not claimed complete. Crisis Cat's assumption that infrastructure and integrations already exist is a scenario input; Day 2 turns it into a readiness checklist to verify before delivery.

The [operations design case study](design-case-study.md) holds the detailed cost model and all 14 SAA-C03 task statements. This training companion adds the client/architect story, the two-day discussion, and local-focused AI routing. It retains the human approval gate, headless event architecture, profitability floor, and evidence-first approach.

## The promise we are designing for

One person can prepare a week of content and follow its commercial results without becoming a cloud operator. Nothing is published without approval of the exact version. Routine work uses deterministic processing or a small model where useful. Accepted jobs have visible outcomes. Growth changes throughput and paid usage within tested limits; it does not remove approvals, platform rules, or cost controls.

Start with [Day 1 — The Creator Workbench](day-1.md).