The Problem
TeachSim taught me LangGraph because the bot had to actually work, with real conversations running through it. GitHub Digest taught me about silent failure modes the same way, by breaking quietly until I went and figured out why. Both stuck because I needed the concept to function, not because I sat down and studied it first.
I already tried the conventional route once. (It probably applies to everything I do and learn throughout my life.) I opened Anthropic's own intro course for Claude Code, the official one, and gave up a few lessons in having retained almost nothing. Nice material, no stakes, nothing to actually break, so nothing stuck.
I want to go deeper into AI engineering now, not just orchestration around an API. Fast.ai for the fundamentals, then something heavier for the practitioner-level material. And I caught myself about to repeat the exact same pattern: open a course, start at lesson one, hope the urgency turns up eventually.
The Discovery
