Roadmap

Your journey to a first break in AI — six steps from first commit to capstone, with AI agents guiding you at every step.

The First Break AI roadmap is a step-by-step learning path designed for anyone starting in AI. Each step builds on the last. AI agents validate your work using firstbreakai validate — so you know exactly when you're ready to move on. The cohort runs May–July 2026, but all materials stay online permanently.

The six steps

Step 1

First use of AI for coding

Set up a Quarto blog and host it on GitHub Pages. Use your AI-based IDE (Cursor, Claude Code) to complete the setup. Learn GitHub basics, website building, and how AI coding tools work in practice.

Step 2

Run a model locally

Run Qwen3 0.6B in pure C — trace every operation from tokenization to token output. Learn inference basics, chat templates, tokenization, temperature, GGUF vs SafeTensors, and transformer architecture.

Step 3

Inference deep dive

Go beyond running a model — understand inference engines (vLLM, TGI, llama.cpp), batching, quantization, speculative decoding, structured output, and API design for serving models at scale.

Step 4

Training fundamentals

Build the foundations to train and fine-tune models. PyTorch, LoRA, QLoRA, distributed training (DDP, FSDP), experiment tracking, and parallelism strategies from a single GPU to multi-node setups.

Step 5

Build an AI product

Ship an AI-powered product end to end — from idea to deployed, monitored application. Product thinking, APIs, RAG, agents, tool use, and keeping it running after launch.

Step 6

Capstone or open-source contribution

Prove what you've learned. Ship a capstone project or make a meaningful contribution to an open-source AI project. Present your work to the cohort for peer feedback.

AI agents validate every step

When you complete a step, run firstbreakai validate N in your terminal. An AI agent checks your code, repo, and environment against the rubric — deterministically, no hallucinations. Your progress syncs across the CLI, the interactive roadmap, and the MCP server. Install @aiedx/firstbreakai from npm to get started.

Open the full interactive roadmap →