A city product owner is starting a permitting FAQ on Claude. What should happen before API design begins?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
You don't pour the foundation before the building department stamps the plans. Lock latency, citations, and language needs before you wire the Claude API.
Full Explanation
Before a city product owner designs Claude API wiring for a permitting FAQ, functional and nonfunctional requirements must be captured—especially latency targets, citation/grounding expectations, and bilingual resident support. Capturing those requirements before API design is correct because API choices (streaming, model tier, retrieval hooks, localization strategy) are consequences of stated needs, not guesses made after code is poured. In municipal permitting, residents and auditors care that answers are timely, grounded in published rules, and available in required languages; those constraints belong in the requirements pack that drives architecture.
Selecting a Claude model version from pilot accuracy benchmarks before stating latency or citation goals fails by concept: benchmark scores are implementation details without requirements and produce an untestable design that invites rework when civic SLAs appear later. Drafting Claude system prompts from permit ordinance excerpts before capturing requirements fails as life-cycle practice—prompt drafting is design work that belongs after the requirements brief, not before it, and risks baking in assumptions rather than resident needs. Prototyping bilingual prompt templates from sample English-Spanish queries before capturing explicit language requirements fails both ethically and technically: sample prompts are not a substitute for a planned language strategy and can misstate permit rules if citation and latency constraints are not defined first.
Exam caveat: requirements-before-design items punish 'pilot-benchmark model selection,' 'ordinance-first prompt drafting,' and 'sample-query bilingual prototyping' distractors. Citation and bilingual needs are first-class civic requirements, not polish. Keep permitting-FAQ city framing. Operational check: write a requirements brief with latency SLOs, citation sources, and language list; gate API design review on that brief; and reject designs that pick a model from pilot benchmarks alone without mapping it to those goals.