Title: Discussion 2 — The Metric That Matters vs. the Metric That's Easy
Course: AIINFRA 303: Capstone Project > Section: Week 02 — Requirements, Success Metrics, and Architecture Decision Records

💬 Discussion 2 — The Metric That Matters vs. the Metric That's Easy (20 pts)

Every capstone has at least two candidate metrics: the one that's easy to instrument and looks good on a dashboard, and the one that actually reflects whether a user's problem got solved. They are not always the same metric. Post your answers to these two prompts:

1. Name one SLI you considered for your capstone that was tempting because it was easy to measure (e.g., "the API responds" or "the model returns an answer") but that you rejected — or should reject — because it doesn't actually capture user experience. Explain what it misses.
2. Name the SLI you actually chose (or are leaning toward), the SLO you'd set for it, and why it more honestly reflects whether your capstone is doing its job. If your project involves classification on imbalanced data, connect this to why accuracy alone would have been the "easy but wrong" choice.

Then respond to at least two classmates — push back if you think their "meaningful" metric is still gameable, or suggest a sharper SLO/time-window than the one they proposed.