Path
Enthusiasts
You read about this stuff for fun, you have opinions about benchmarks, and you've been waiting for a reason to actually build something with it.
Most of us got pulled in by the demos. The benchmarks, the leaked memos, the founder podcasts, the post-launch tweets. The thing nobody tells you about that conversation is that it gets a lot more interesting once you're shipping things, instead of just reading about people who are.
This path assumes you've been reading enough to know what most of the words mean already. The exercises skip the basics and go straight to the part where you build a thing that the people you've been reading would respect.
Internal Dashboard
A single-page app for the metrics, reports, or tools your team checks daily.
Open template →What “shipped” looks like: A working evals harness for a model behavior you actually care about, plus the writeup that explains what you found and where the model surprised you.
Time to functional: Functional in two to three weeks if you redirect your AI-reading time toward AI-building time. The reading list will still be there when you finish.
Use these guides in this order, enthusiasts.
The shortest path through. Read the five sections below across two to three weeks, ship a small evals harness with a writeup, post it where the people you respect will see it.
Start Here
The pitch in 800 words: AI is finally good enough that the gap between consuming the discourse and producing real work is just a curriculum away.
~15 min read02Read This
The five things that have to be true before AI lets you ship work that holds up under the kind of scrutiny you apply to other people's work.
~25 min read03Set Up Your Tools
The minimum software setup. A laptop you already have, two account signups, and the same $20 subscription you've probably already had for a year.
~30 min setup, between podcasts04Write Your First Spec
The worked example: turn "I want to compare how three frontier models handle code review on real PRs" into a spec an agent can build.
~1 hr write, deep-focus block05Ship This Thing
Hand the spec to the agent, watch it work, deploy the result and write up what you found. Post it where the people you respect will see it.
~6 hrs build, weekend