· 8 min read
Behind the scenes: ILLUMINATE AI Mastery, Cohort 1
cohort behind-the-scenes
The premise
We launched ILLUMINATE AI Mastery as a bilingual, 8-week, project-based cohort for senior practitioners — engineers, designers, PMs, and founders who already ship and wanted to compound their workflow with AI.
What worked
- Capstone-first scheduling. We anchored every week to a milestone on the participant’s own project. No filler exercises.
- Daily 30-minute office hours. Async cohorts feel lonely. The daily live block kept momentum.
- A shared context library. Every participant contributed their best prompts to a shared repo. By week 6, the library had 200+ prompts and was the most-used artifact of the cohort.
What we changed
The first version of the curriculum had too much breadth. Cohort 2 narrows the depth axis: instead of “intro to RAG, agents, evals, fine-tuning,” we go deep on agents + evals and trust participants to take the rest into self-study.
What’s next
Cohort 2 starts in May. Apply via the contact page if you’d like to be considered.