01 Day 1
Available
Diagnosis, Learning Methods, and Environment
- Prerequisites
- High-school reading comprehension Basic command-line terminal awareness
- Recovery Links
- Baseline
Curriculum ledger
90-Day Curriculum Calendar & Active-Time Ledger
Complete prerequisite DAG, weekly consolidation review, and 43,200-minute effort ledger
90
Study Days
720
Active Hours
43,200
Active Minutes
Category Hour Budgets
Self-Directed Learning & Python
180 hours
10,800 minutes
AI Mathematics & Calculus
144 hours
8,640 minutes
Models, Pretraining & LoRA
288 hours
17,280 minutes
AI Agents & Systems
108 hours
6,480 minutes
Block 01 Days 01–03
Diagnosis, Learning Methods, and Environment
Self-Directed Learning & Python02 Day 2
Available
Concept decomposition and minimal reproductions
- Prerequisites
- day-01
- Recovery Links
- day-01
03 Day 3
Available
Recovery drill: diagnose a failed environment
- Prerequisites
- day-02
- Recovery Links
- day-01 day-02
Block 02 Days 04–06
Python Values, Types, and Conditions
Self-Directed Learning & Python04 Day 4
Available
Values, binding, and observable text
- Prerequisites
- day-03
- Recovery Links
- day-03 day-02
05 Day 5
Available
Mutation, identity, types, and comparisons
- Prerequisites
- day-04
- Recovery Links
- day-04 day-03
06 Day 6
Available
Truthiness and branching with text/data
- Prerequisites
- day-05
- Recovery Links
- day-05 day-04
Block 03 Days 07–09
Loops, Functions, and Containers
Self-Directed Learning & Python07 Day 7
Available
Weekly review — values, conditions, and safe Git
- Prerequisites
- day-06
- Recovery Links
- day-06
08 Day 8
Available
Loops, loop invariants, and function inputs and outputs
- Prerequisites
- day-07
- Recovery Links
- day-07
09 Day 9
Available
Lists, dictionaries, frequency counts, and safe Git recovery
- Prerequisites
- day-08
- Recovery Links
- day-07
Block 04 Days 10–12
Files, Exceptions, Environments, and Tests
Self-Directed Learning & Python10 Day 10
Available
Files, paths, and encodings
- Prerequisites
- day-09
- Recovery Links
- day-07
11 Day 11
Available
Exceptions and isolated environments
- Prerequisites
- day-10
- Recovery Links
- day-07
12 Day 12
Available
Tests and repeatable programs
- Prerequisites
- day-11
- Recovery Links
- day-07
Block 05 Days 13–15
Text Project and Git Collaboration
Self-Directed Learning & Python13 Day 13
Available
Text and data Learning Project
- Prerequisites
- day-12
- Recovery Links
- day-07
14 Day 14
Available
Git collaboration in a disposable repository
- Prerequisites
- day-13
- Recovery Links
- day-13
15 Day 15
Available
Reproduce, evaluate, and hand off the text project
- Prerequisites
- day-14
- Recovery Links
- day-13 day-14
Block 06 Days 16–18
Functions, Limits, and Derivatives
AI Mathematics & Calculus16 Day 16
Available
Functions, slopes, and limits
- Prerequisites
- day-15
- Recovery Links
- Baseline
17 Day 17
Available
Limits, derivatives, and nondifferentiability
- Prerequisites
- day-16
- Recovery Links
- day-16
18 Day 18
Available
Finite differences, step size, and floating-point effects
- Prerequisites
- day-17
- Recovery Links
- day-17
Block 07 Days 19–21
Chain Rule and Multivariable Gradients
AI Mathematics & Calculus19 Day 19
Available
The chain rule for composed functions
- Prerequisites
- day-18
- Recovery Links
- day-18
20 Day 20
Available
Partial derivatives and the gradient vector
- Prerequisites
- day-19
- Recovery Links
- day-19
21 Day 21
Available
Computational graphs and the backpropagation connection (review)
- Prerequisites
- day-20
- Recovery Links
- day-20
Block 08 Days 22–24
Linear Algebra and Tensor Reasoning
AI Mathematics & Calculus22 Day 22
Available
Vectors, Dot Products, and Matrices as Linear Maps
- Prerequisites
- day-21
- Recovery Links
- day-21
23 Day 23
Available
Matrix Multiplication, Shape Ledgers, Transpose & Inverse
- Prerequisites
- day-22
- Recovery Links
- day-21
24 Day 24
Available
Tensors, Broadcasting, Reshape, and Memory Ledgers
- Prerequisites
- day-23
- Recovery Links
- day-21
Block 09 Days 25–27
Probability, Sampling, and Information
AI Mathematics & Calculus25 Day 25
Available
Probability Foundations: Events, Conditional Probability, and Bayes
- Prerequisites
- day-24
- Recovery Links
- Baseline
26 Day 26
Available
Random Variables, Expectation, Sampling, and Maximum Likelihood
- Prerequisites
- day-25
- Recovery Links
- day-25
27 Day 27
Available
Information Theory: Entropy, Cross-Entropy, and Language-Model Loss
- Prerequisites
- day-26
- Recovery Links
- day-26
Block 10 Days 28–30
Statistics, Evaluation, and Optimization
AI Mathematics & Calculus28 Day 28
Available
Statistics — summaries, sampling uncertainty, inference
- Prerequisites
- day-27
- Recovery Links
- day-25
29 Day 29
Available
Evaluation — splits, leakage, and metrics
- Prerequisites
- day-28
- Recovery Links
- day-28
30 Day 30
Available
Optimization — gradient descent and its failure modes
- Prerequisites
- day-29
- Recovery Links
- day-28
Block 11 Days 31–33
Independently Implement Automatic Differentiation
AI Mathematics & Calculus31 Day 31
Available
Forward Computation Graphs, Local Derivatives & Reverse-Mode Chain Rule
- Prerequisites
- day-30
- Recovery Links
- day-28
32 Day 32
Available
Topological Sorting, Shared-Node Gradient Accumulation & Gradcheck Tolerances
- Prerequisites
- day-31
- Recovery Links
- day-28
33 Day 33
Available
Diagnostic Failure Case Analysis & Independent Mastery Project Rubric
- Prerequisites
- day-32
- Recovery Links
- day-28
Block 12 Days 34–36
MLPs and Backpropagation
Models, Pretraining & LoRA34 Day 34
Available
MLP Structure and the Forward Pass
- Prerequisites
- day-33
- Recovery Links
- day-28
35 Day 35
Available
Backpropagation by Hand and Gradient Flow
- Prerequisites
- day-34
- Recovery Links
- day-28
36 Day 36
Available
Training Loops and Gradient Failure Diagnosis
- Prerequisites
- day-35
- Recovery Links
- day-28
Block 13 Days 37–39
Text Modeling and Tokenization
Models, Pretraining & LoRA37 Day 37
Available
Text to Tokens — Unicode, Byte Encodings, and Vocabularies
- Prerequisites
- day-36
- Recovery Links
- day-35
38 Day 38
Available
N-gram Language Models — Counts, Conditional Probability, and Smoothing
- Prerequisites
- day-37
- Recovery Links
- day-35
39 Day 39
Available
Byte-Pair Encoding — Merge Mechanics and Tokenizer Boundaries
- Prerequisites
- day-38
- Recovery Links
- day-35
Block 14 Days 40–42
Embeddings and Neural Language Models
Models, Pretraining & LoRA40 Day 40
Available
Learned Embedding Tables and Distributed Representations
- Prerequisites
- day-39
- Recovery Links
- day-35
41 Day 41
Available
The Neural Language Model Forward Pass
- Prerequisites
- day-40
- Recovery Links
- day-35
42 Day 42
Available
Loss, Training Discipline, and Weekly Consolidation
- Prerequisites
- day-41
- Recovery Links
- day-35
Block 15 Days 43–45
Attention and Causal Constraints
Models, Pretraining & LoRA43 Day 43
Available
Scaled Dot-Product Attention and Query-Key-Value Projections
- Prerequisites
- day-42
- Recovery Links
- day-42 day-35
44 Day 44
Available
Autoregressive Causal Masking and Strict Invariance
- Prerequisites
- day-43
- Recovery Links
- day-43 day-42
45 Day 45
Available
Multi-Head Attention Mechanics and Numerical Stability
- Prerequisites
- day-44
- Recovery Links
- day-44 day-42
Block 16 Days 46–48
Assemble and Explain a Transformer
Models, Pretraining & LoRA46 Day 46
Available
Transformer Block Assembly: LayerNorm, RMSNorm, and Residuals
- Prerequisites
- day-45
- Recovery Links
- day-43
47 Day 47
Available
Feedforward Networks (FFN), SwiGLU, and Stacking Blocks
- Prerequisites
- day-46
- Recovery Links
- day-44
48 Day 48
Available
Complete Decoder-Only Transformer: Position, Weight Tying, and Logits
- Prerequisites
- day-47
- Recovery Links
- day-45
Block 17 Days 49–51
Run the Pretraining Loop
Models, Pretraining & LoRA49 Day 49
Available
Week 7 Consolidation: Attention to Logits, plus the Pretraining Data Pipeline
- Prerequisites
- day-48
- Recovery Links
- day-42
50 Day 50
Available
Optimization Mechanics: AdamW Decoupled Weight Decay and Schedules
- Prerequisites
- day-49
- Recovery Links
- day-49
51 Day 51
Available
Running the Pretraining Loop: Loss Tracking, Checkpointing, and Failure Diagnosis
- Prerequisites
- day-50
- Recovery Links
- day-49
Block 18 Days 52–54
Generation, Overfitting, and Evaluation
Models, Pretraining & LoRA52 Day 52
Available
Autoregressive Text Generation: Temperature, Top-k, and Nucleus (Top-p) Sampling
- Prerequisites
- day-51
- Recovery Links
- day-49
53 Day 53
Available
Evaluation Protocols: Validation Loss Gap, Overfitting, and Perplexity
- Prerequisites
- day-52
- Recovery Links
- day-50
54 Day 54
Available
Failure Gallery: Degenerative Loops, Hallucination, and Capstone Mastery
- Prerequisites
- day-53
- Recovery Links
- day-51
Block 19 Days 55–57
Checkpoints and Resource Planning
Models, Pretraining & LoRA55 Day 55
Available
Checkpoints, State Dictionaries & Safe Resumption
- Prerequisites
- day-54
- Recovery Links
- day-49
56 Day 56
Available
Week 8 Consolidation: Optimizer to Checkpoint, plus Resource Planning
- Prerequisites
- day-55
- Recovery Links
- day-49
57 Day 57
Available
Fault Tolerance, Checkpoint Corruption Recovery & Billing Defense
- Prerequisites
- day-56
- Recovery Links
- day-49
Block 20 Days 58–60
Reproduce Cloud-GPU Pretraining
Models, Pretraining & LoRA58 Day 58
Available
Cloud Pretraining Preflight, Cost Ceilings & Offline Drills
- Prerequisites
- day-57
- Recovery Links
- day-55
59 Day 59
Available
Unattended Cloud Execution, Metric Telemetry & Active Analysis
- Prerequisites
- day-58
- Recovery Links
- day-55
60 Day 60
Available
Post-Mortem Evaluation, Billing Audit, Safetensors & Teardown
- Prerequisites
- day-59
- Recovery Links
- day-55
Block 21 Days 61–63
Instruction Data and Training Objectives
Models, Pretraining & LoRA61 Day 61
Available
Instruction Data Formats, Schemas & Token Boundary Alignment
- Prerequisites
- day-60
- Recovery Links
- day-56
62 Day 62
Available
Loss Masking & Target Label Construction
- Prerequisites
- day-61
- Recovery Links
- day-56
63 Day 63
Available
Week 9 Consolidation: Cloud Run to SFT Data, plus Benchmark Decontamination
- Prerequisites
- day-62
- Recovery Links
- day-56
Block 22 Days 64–66
LoRA Mathematics and Engineering
Models, Pretraining & LoRA64 Day 64
Available
LoRA Mathematics: Low-Rank Factorization & Scaling
- Prerequisites
- day-63
- Recovery Links
- day-58
65 Day 65
Available
LoRA Engineering: Weight Freezing, Gradients & Optimizer Collapse
- Prerequisites
- day-64
- Recovery Links
- day-58
66 Day 66
Available
Adapter Lifecycles: Serialization, Merging & Zero-Latency Serving
- Prerequisites
- day-65
- Recovery Links
- day-58
Block 23 Days 67–69
Run the Real Fine-Tuning Experiment
Models, Pretraining & LoRA67 Day 67
Available
Fine-Tuning Recipe Preflight, Zero-Shot Baselines & Spending Caps
- Prerequisites
- day-66
- Recovery Links
- day-64
68 Day 68
Available
Unattended Adapter Training, Loss Dynamics & Overfitting Watchdogs
- Prerequisites
- day-67
- Recovery Links
- day-64
69 Day 69
Available
LoRA Post-Mortem: Delta Evaluation, Regression Audits & Teardown
- Prerequisites
- day-68
- Recovery Links
- day-64
Block 24 Days 70–72
Evaluate Models and Attribute Failures
Self-Directed Learning & Python70 Day 70
Available
Week 10 Consolidation: LoRA to Delta Evaluation, plus Honest Benchmarking
- Prerequisites
- day-69
- Recovery Links
- day-63
71 Day 71
Available
Quantitative Evaluation Metrics & Statistical Confidence
- Prerequisites
- day-70
- Recovery Links
- day-70
72 Day 72
Available
Failure Attribution, Qualitative Error Taxonomies & Comparison Reports
- Prerequisites
- day-71
- Recovery Links
- day-70
Block 25 Days 73–75
Agent Loops and Tool Protocols
AI Agents & Systems73 Day 73
Available
The Tool-Using Agent Control Loop - Model Requests, Actions, and Observations
- Prerequisites
- day-72
- Recovery Links
- day-70
74 Day 74
Available
Tool Schemas, Validation, and Protocol Boundaries
- Prerequisites
- day-73
- Recovery Links
- day-70
75 Day 75
Available
Failure Feedback, Bounded Repair, and Independently Verified Outcomes
- Prerequisites
- day-74
- Recovery Links
- day-70
Block 26 Days 76–78
Agent State, Retries, and Execution Limits
AI Agents & Systems76 Day 76
Available
Agent Run States, Checkpoints & Idempotent Effects
- Prerequisites
- day-75
- Recovery Links
- day-70
77 Day 77
Available
Consolidation Review - State, Retries & Failure Taxonomy
- Prerequisites
- day-76
- Recovery Links
- day-70
78 Day 78
Available
Retry Budgets, Timeouts & Honest Execution Limits
- Prerequisites
- day-77
- Recovery Links
- day-77
Block 27 Days 79–81
Deliver Engineering Work with an Agent
Self-Directed Learning & Python79 Day 79
Available
Bounded Requirements, Context Packs & Permission Budgets
- Prerequisites
- day-78
- Recovery Links
- day-77 day-75
80 Day 80
Available
Diff Review, Independent Tests & CI Failure Recovery
- Prerequisites
- day-79
- Recovery Links
- day-78 day-76
81 Day 81
Available
Controlled Delivery, Merge Recovery & Verified Rollback
- Prerequisites
- day-80
- Recovery Links
- day-79 day-77
Block 28 Days 82–84
Evaluate Agents Scientifically
AI Agents & Systems82 Day 82
Available
Scientific Agent Evaluation I — Pre-Registered Protocols & Baselines
- Prerequisites
- day-81
- Recovery Links
- day-77
83 Day 83
Available
Scientific Agent Evaluation II — Confounders, Failure Attribution & Honest Interpretation
- Prerequisites
- day-82
- Recovery Links
- day-77
84 Day 84
Available
Consolidation & Assessment Review — Scientific Agent Evaluation
- Prerequisites
- day-83
- Recovery Links
- day-77
Block 29 Days 85–87
Integrate the Capstone Learning Project
AI Agents & Systems85 Day 85
Available
Capstone Charter - Problem, Scope & Model Selection
- Prerequisites
- day-84
- Recovery Links
- day-84
86 Day 86
Available
Capstone Integration - Harness, Baseline & Controlled Delivery
- Prerequisites
- day-85
- Recovery Links
- day-85
87 Day 87
Available
Capstone Acceptance - Evaluation, Evidence & Review
- Prerequisites
- day-86
- Recovery Links
- day-84
Block 30 Days 88–90
Demonstrate Mastery and Assemble a Portfolio
AI Agents & Systems88 Day 88
Available
Independent Mastery Retrieval — AI-Free Evidence Sweep
- Prerequisites
- day-87
- Recovery Links
- day-84
89 Day 89
Available
Corrections, Partial-Failure Feedback & the Agent-Assisted Engineering Check
- Prerequisites
- day-88
- Recovery Links
- day-84
90 Day 90
Available
Portfolio Assembly, Provenance Audit & the Next-Learning Plan
- Prerequisites
- day-89
- Recovery Links
- day-89