Using AI

This track teaches you to work with AI tools effectively — not as a passive user who pastes prompts and hopes for the best, but as a skilled director who understands what AI can and cannot do, crafts clear instructions, and verifies the output. The durable skill is not knowing every shortcut in a particular AI product; it is understanding the underlying mechanics well enough to get consistent, useful results from any AI tool.

The beginner tier starts from the ground up: what AI actually is (no magic, just statistics at scale), how large language models generate text, where they reliably excel and where they reliably fail, and how to have a productive back-and-forth conversation with one. You will finish the beginner tier having used an AI to write your first small program and having read and verified that code yourself.

Later tiers build on this foundation. Intermediate covers prompt engineering patterns, using AI for code review and debugging, and understanding when an AI answer needs a second opinion. Advanced covers directing AI agents on multi-step programming tasks, integrating AI tools into a development workflow, and the practices that keep AI-assisted work auditable and correct. Every tier ties back to the same core discipline: you are the one who understands the goal and validates the result — the AI is a fast, capable, but error-prone collaborator.