About this series.

I'm going to take a fresh paper - Self-Distilled Agentic Reinforcement Learning (SDAR, arXiv:2605.15155) - and architect it end to end on AWS: the system design, the actual gate code, the evaluation plan, and a brutally honest cost model.

What I'm not going to do is wave a benchmark number around.

Reproducing a paper like this costs thousands in GPU time, and I'd rather show you the machinery than a screenshot you can't audit. The design is the deliverable.

This is Part 1.