Courses I-IV · Design the System
Courses I through IV teach you what real systems like Instagram, Stripe, and Netflix are made of, using the same seven building blocks.
Assessments and challenges, hands-on labs, real feedback.
Course 0 is the $99 on-ramp: it teaches you to command an AI agent on real work. Courses I-IV then build the judgment to evaluate what it built.
The same shape, four times: video lessons, two hands-on labs, feedback on your answers, one design challenge.
The foundation: the seven parts every system is actually made of, and the three outside forces that act on them (people, other companies' services, and time). You learn them by designing a link shortener from MVP through viral growth to monetization.
Instagram, Netflix, YouTube: the read-heavy systems everyone uses. Five progressive case studies, from a blog to semantic search.
Slack, Discord, WhatsApp: systems where milliseconds matter. Five progressive case studies, from a social feed to AI chatbots to video conferencing.
Stripe, Shopify, Salesforce: systems where a wrong design is a double charge. Four progressive case studies, from e-commerce to dynamic pricing to peer-to-peer payments.
The public overview video for each course, so you know what you're getting before you buy.
In Anthropic's trial, the AI group scored 17 points lower on a quiz about their own code. That quiz also measured debugging, code reading, and the judgment call on whether AI-written code follows the right design patterns. That's what Courses I through IV teach: the seven building blocks as the vocabulary for judging what the AI built.
A CHI 2026 study of ten junior and ten senior engineers found the same shape from the other side: seniors keep control by arriving with a plan and delegating only what fits, while juniors on unfamiliar code swing between over-reliance and avoidance. (Feng, Yun, Wang, "From Junior to Senior," CHI 2026.)
Anyone who can code a little and wants to know whether what an AI builds holds up. That covers new grads, career switchers and working engineers who ship with an agent.
No. Either order works. Course 0 teaches you to command an AI agent on real work; Courses I-IV teach you the seven building blocks, so you can tell a good design from one that will break. Most people take Course 0 first, then Courses I-IV, but nothing here requires it.
You submit your own design decisions for each case study, and you get feedback on the decisions you actually made: which ones held up, and which ones a senior engineer would have questioned.
Lifetime access. The courses are self-paced: work through them on your own schedule, Course I first, then II, III, and IV in order.
Every purchase carries a 30-day money-back guarantee: if it is not for you, request a full refund through the contact page within 30 days of purchase, no questions asked. After 30 days, the sale is final.
