The weekly letter from Systems Thinking Lab: systems thinking insights for junior engineers, framed through the seven building blocks.
I recorded the last video for Systems Thinking in the AI Era this week.
That is the four-course series I teach: the seven building blocks behind systems from Instagram to Stripe, the tradeoffs that come with them, and how to design with them instead of just coding around them. Every lesson, every discovery lab, every case study, every challenge, every assessment across all four courses is now recorded and live. 78 videos.
The original plan had this finishing September 30. It finished 45 days early.
That milestone changes the price, because I told you it would.
When Courses 2, 3, and 4 launched, I priced them $35 below what they would eventually cost and said the discount would hold until every video was recorded. That was the promise, stated plainly, not a sales tactic. It is done, so the promise is honored: Courses 2, 3, and 4 are now $149 each.
Course 1 is $149 too, up from $99. Course 1 was never part of that recording promise. It is moving because $99 is priced for the first course in the series, and starting September 30, that is Course 0, not Course 1.
There is a fifth course coming. Course 0 ships September 30, at $99, and it answers the question junior engineers keep landing on, in different words each time. Not how do you design a system, but how do you work with AI day to day so the code it writes is something you can stand behind.
Course 0 gives you the structure. Courses 1 through 4 give you the judgment.
When Course 0 ships, the pricing changes again: $399 for the whole five-course catalog, and a smaller number to complete it if you already own something. What you already own carries forward. You are not starting over.
None of that exists yet. Course 0 is not built, the $399 catalog is not for sale, the $300 completion price is not active, and Course 0 is not free for anyone yet. All four of those arrive September 30.
What it means for you depends on where you are starting from.
If you have not bought anything yet: wait for launch, and the whole five-course catalog is $399 at that point. Or start today at $149, if a head start matters more to you than hitting the lowest number. Or wait for Course 0 alone at $99, if the structure is all you need right now.
That start-today option is a different bet. You start now, nearly six weeks before Course 0 exists, and the $300 completion price locks in for you the moment it goes live. Do the arithmetic honestly: one course today plus completing later is $149 plus $300, which is $449, $50 more than the $399 catalog price. That is the real trade. A head start and a fixed price, against not hitting the single lowest number possible.
If you already own any course today, but not the full set: $300 completes the whole catalog, Course 0 included, once it ships.
If you own all four courses when Course 0 ships: Course 0 is free. Not discounted. Free.
You do not need Course 0 to start building judgment. The four courses that teach it are finished today.
What is real today: four finished courses, $149 each, at systemthinkinglab.ai.
P.S. If you own any course today but not the full set, the number to remember is $300. That is what finishing the whole catalog costs starting September 30. If you own all four when Course 0 ships, the number is $0. Course 0 is free.