AI Foundations

Why this order

The order matters more than it looks. The course comes first because everything after it assumes the vocabulary — role, context, constraints, few-shot — and doing the challenges without that language means noticing that something worked without being able to say why.

The two challenges in the middle are deliberately adversarial. They ask you to find where instruction-following breaks rather than to produce something impressive, because knowing a model's limits is what stops you trusting it in the wrong place later.

How long it takes

Around six to eight hours of actual work, best spread over two or three weeks. Doing it in a weekend is possible and mostly wasted — the projects only teach you something if you come back to them after using what you built.

How you'll know you're done

You have finished when you have a prompt library of your own with at least ten entries you actually reuse, and when you can look at a bad AI response and say which of the five components was missing. If you are still fixing bad output by rephrasing and hoping, go back to the course.