ILLUMINATE — AI Mastery

Who it’s for

You ship for a living. You’ve used Claude, GPT-4, or Gemini in your day-to-day, but feel like you’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible. You want to build the muscle of designing, evaluating, and shipping AI-native systems.

Outcomes

By the end of the cohort, you will have:

• Built and shipped a real AI-powered product, end-to-end.
• A versioned prompt library and an evaluation harness running in CI.
• A live demo, recorded for your portfolio.

Format

• 8 weeks, ~6 hours per week
• Tuesday & Thursday live sessions (90 minutes each)
• Daily 30-minute drop-in office hours
• Weekly 1:1 critique with a Lab mentor
• Shared cohort Slack + private GitHub org

Curriculum

1. Week 1 — Frame: project selection, success criteria, eval design
2. Week 2 — Prompt as spec: prompt versioning, evals in CI
3. Week 3 — Retrieval: when to RAG, when not to
4. Week 4 — Agents: tool use, planning, error recovery
5. Week 5 — UX: streaming, latency, mistakes-as-affordances
6. Week 6 — Cost & infra: caching, batch, spend governance
7. Week 7 — Hardening: red-teaming, safety, observability
8. Week 8 — Demo: capstone presentations, recorded for portfolio