Warm up in about three hours. Put a pretrained model or read-only API function behind a URL, using non-sensitive data. Measure one request and one failure, and reuse this deployment path.
Next, the evaluation-first application. Pick a narrow task you care about and can judge, ideally on documents from your Chapter 2 domain, such as extracting fields from its appeals or forms. If the domain has no suitable documents, triage your own issue tracker or draft first-pass replies. Follow the evaluation loop above. Skip retrieval when the input already holds everything needed.
The result is a repository whose evaluation suite predates optimisation, with evaluation history, failure examples, the development/release split and a measured operating-cost table.
Then re-scope it into a small product with a public URL, following the two-week plan below.