A shared free model endpoint works fine as workshop infrastructure, provided you stop treating it as an API and start treating it as a scarce, shared, non-deterministic resource. The plan below moves twenty students through four timed exercises against one endpoint and produces three artifacts you can actually grade. The failure that ruins these sessions is rarely model quality; it is contention plus grading noise. Recent DEV threads about AI cost and about intermediaries sitting between developers and models point the same direction: give people direct, measured access and the complaints mostly disappear.

Three failure modes to design against

Before the agenda, name the problems out loud so the room recognizes them when they appear at minute 12.

Thundering herd. Twenty students times five prompts is one hundred requests in a two-minute window, and nobody in the room knows the endpoint's real concurrency ceiling.…