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Season 1 · Weeks 1–4 · 4 weeks

Season 1: Spark.

Your assistant FRIDAY is born. Learn how computers, the internet and AI models actually work, starting from zero.

Open the season mapPlay a free lesson

Start from zero. Learn what a program is, how the internet talks and what is inside a language model, while you build your own assistant, FRIDAY: first a script that greets you, then a chat with a free model, then a home on GitHub and a personality of its own.

How you learn

Think in steps, write your first Python, follow a request across the planet, then open a language model up and see how it thinks.

What you build

FRIDAY: your own assistant in your terminal that keeps your to-dos, talks with a free AI model, and follows rules you wrote.

The weeks

  1. Week 1A very obedient machine

    You can explain what a program is, how a computer runs it, break a problem into exact steps, and write small Python programs with variables, choices and loops.

    6 lessons

  2. Week 2A letter across the planet

    You can explain how a message crosses the internet, what happens in a web request, read JSON from an API, keep keys secret, and make your first call to a free AI model.

    6 lessons

  3. Week 3Tools of the trade

    You can work in the terminal, organise code into functions and modules, read errors calmly, use Git and GitHub, use AI tools well, and plan a feature before you build it.

    6 lessons

  4. Week 4What's inside the mind

    You can explain tokens, embeddings, attention, training and sampling in plain words with the small maths behind them, and give FRIDAY a personality, rules and answers you can check.

    6 lessons

Skills you prove

Tiles on the periodic table of skills that this season lights up.

Programming
Write small Python programs with variables, lists, loops, choices and functions (week 1)
Bits & numbers
Explain how a computer stores text, pictures and numbers as bits, and why floats round (week 1)
Networks & HTTP
Explain how a request crosses the internet and read an HTTP request and response (week 2)
Terminal & Git
Work in the terminal and keep your code safe with Git commits (week 3)
Backprop
Derive backprop through softmax + cross-entropy on paper (week 4)
Attention
Write causal self-attention, a training loop and BPE from a blank file (week 4)
Token math
Price any call in input, output and cached tokens, and report cost per task (week 2)
Paper → code
Read a paper in three passes and reimplement its core (week 4)

Checkpoint test: Spark

After week 4. Explain how a message reaches FRIDAY and back, from keyboard to model, in your own words.

  • Explain, without notes, how a message travels from your keyboard to FRIDAY's model and back
  • Write the steps for a small everyday task so exactly that a literal robot could follow them
  • FRIDAY part 1 and part 2 are public, run from a fresh clone, and their tests pass
  • Tokenize a short sentence by hand and explain what temperature changes, with one example

Free to try