Curriculum Changelog
Track every update to the AI Engineering Bootcamp curriculum. We stay at the edge of AI engineering, constantly evolving with the latest tools, frameworks, and best practices.
Cohort 9 [v0.9]
currentJan – Mar 2026
📜 View Detailed CurriculumDemo Day Projects: Coming Soon
All in on Agent Engineering.
New Additions
- •🎖️ Explicitly asking for each submission, "Did you use a coding agent to complete this assignment?"
- •🏢 The CTO test: "explain the essential lines of code in each loom video submission in plain language as if you're speaking to your CTO."
- •⬆️ Higher bar for receiving human feedback (we will meet AI slop with AI slop)
- •🏁 Two additional Demo Day project deadline checkpoints (project proposal, project certification)
- •🧠 Agent Memory
- •📶 Deep Agents & using skills via Deep Agents CLI
- •🧰 Agent Skills
- •🕵️ Dedicated Deep Research session
- •1️⃣ Incorporated LangChain v1.0, LangGraph v1.0, and LangSmith Platform
- •📊 Expansion of Evals content throughout
- •🚢 Clarity about types of servers covered (e.g., agent, LLM, application, MCP servers)
- •🔌 Expanded MCP coverage for client (connector) and server (agent communication) sides
- •🏦 Explicit "Semantic Caching" coverage
Deprecated
- ×OpenAI Agents SDK
- ×Dedicated On-Prem Session
Key Highlights
- →Significantly more depth on agents, memory, deployment various levels of agent orchestration
- →New primary cohort use case
- →Now four Demo Day checkpoints throughout the course to keep you on track
- →Stricter grading policy standards to combat coding agents
Cohort 8
completedSep – Nov 2025
Everything is context. RAG + Agents = Agentic RAG.
New Additions
- •🪟 Expanded coverage and threading of context engineering
- •💼 How people are using ChatGPT and Claude
- •🗂️ Classic RAG = Dense Vector Retrieval
- •🌐 OSS models --> GPT-OSS and Embedding Gemma, remotely and locally
- •📊 Adopting Evals terminology
- •🛤️ Combining Guardrails and Caching
Deprecated
- ×Explicit coverage of LLM Ops
Key Highlights
- →Demo Day Semi-Final Competition Round
- →Primary cohort use case: What should you build and why?
- →Early integration of open-source models in curriculum
Cohort 7
completedJun – Aug 2025
Incorporating Context Engineering and agent communication
New Additions
- •🪟 Context Engineering from first principles
- •💼 Primary cohort use case building throughout the cohort
- •🔌 Expanded Model Context Protocol (MCP) content
- •🤖 Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol for building and running multi-agent systems
- •🛤️ Dedicated Guardrails session
Deprecated
- ×Fine-Tuning of LLMs and Embedding models (now table stakes)
- ×Inference & GPU Optimization
Key Highlights
- →Primary cohort use case: Student loans customer service
- →Protocol-first approach to agent architecture
- →Enhanced security and guardrails implementation
Cohort 6
completedMar – May 2025
Agent systems and production deployment foundations
New Additions
- •🎲 Increased prerequisites and an enhanced AIE challenge.
- •🧑💻 Cursor (with Claude), uv, and vibe coding! (Learn free)
- •🦥 Fine-tune Llama 3.1 for reasoning (Learn free)
- •🧐 Build your own open-source Deep Research application with LangGraph (similar to this)
- •🔟 Expanded 10-dimensional Learning Targets
- •🤩 Certification Challenge even more aligned with Demo Day!
- •🛣️ Curated Journey Groups led by Peer Supporters.
Key Highlights
- →First cohort with dedicated agent systems track
- →Production deployment best practices established
- →Comprehensive evaluation methodology introduced
Cohort 5
completedDec 2024 – Feb 2025
Test-time compute and reasoning with enhanced peer support
New Additions
- •🤔 Test-time Compute and Reasoning: It turns out that reasoning can be achieved within the LLM, or outside of the LLM through agentic patterns. In cohort 5, for the first time, we learn both methods of reasoning!
- •🧑🤝🧑 Enhanced Peer Support: We've got an instructional staff of 10 experienced AI Makerspace-certified peer supporters here to elevate your learning experience. They'll lead breakout rooms, provide comprehensive grading feedback, and host a dedicated weekly office hour just for AIE5 students.
- •🥽 Deep Dive Sessions: Back by popular demand, every Tuesday at 10 AM PT, join Vincent Kienzler for a 90-minute deep dive into the week's content, designed to clarify concepts and enhance your understanding.
- •📅 Midterm to Demo Day: We've redesigned the midterm to align with your Demo Day final project, ensuring a smoother, more impactful learning journey. Check out previous Demo Day projects!
- •🌎 Alumni Meetups: Upon completing an AI Makerspace course, you'll become part of a global community of practitioners advancing their careers in AI Engineering. Join meetups, connect with peers, and continue growing with this thriving network.
Key Highlights
- →First cohort to introduce dual reasoning approaches
- →Expanded peer support with 10 certified instructors
- →Weekly deep dive sessions for comprehensive learning
Cohort 4
completedSep – Nov 2024
Dropped LlamaIndex to go all in on LangGraph
New Additions
- •🕴️ Multi-agent applications with LangGraph.
- •🧪 Synthetic Data Generation (SDG).
- •🪄 Advanced Prompt Engineering with DSPy.
- •🗂️ Advanced RAG: semantic chunking, hybrid retrieval.
- •🚀 Prod-readiness via caching, async, parallelization.
- •🏢 On-premise considerations.
- •⚛️ Inference optimization via quantization (GGUF & AWQ).
- •🔠 More details on basic embedding models.
- •💬 Key front-end UI elements (e.g., PDF upload).
Deprecated
- ×LlamaIndex (we've gone all in on 🔗 LangChain).
- ×OpenAI Assistants API (🔗 LangGraph).
- ×WandB Prompts (🔗 LangSmith).
- ×⚖️ Fine-Tuning: LlamaIndex HF Sentence Transformers.
Key Highlights
- →⚖️ Fine-Tuning: HF Sentence Transformers.
- →🚢 LLM serving & inference: vLLM.
- →↗️ QDrant as go-to scalable vector DB.
- →🤖 Chat model: GPT-4o-mini.
- →🤖 Embedding model: text-3-embedding-small.
- →🦾 Open chat model: Llama 3 8B Instruct.
- →🦾 Open embeddings: Arctic Embed M.
Cohort 3
completedJun – Aug 2024
Enhanced UIs, user feedback collection, and expanded project time
New Additions
- •💬 Building UIs for RAG & agentic systems
- •🗣️ Collecting and evaluating user feedback
- •🔢 Embedding fine-tuning before LLM fine-tuning
- •🏗️ More time to build for Demo Day! (we've added a week!)
Key Highlights
- →Focus on production-ready user interfaces
- →Comprehensive feedback and evaluation systems
- →Extended project development timeline
Cohort 2
completedMar – May 2024
Comprehensive framework coverage with LangChain and LlamaIndex
New Additions
- •🤖 No-Code GPT
- •🏗️ LLM Application
- •🗃️ RAG Application
- •🕴️ Agent Application
- •⚖️ Fine-Tuned Model
- •🔗 LangChain
- •🦙 LlamaIndex
- •📈 RAG Assessment
Key Highlights
- →🤑 Industry Use Cases
- →🚀 Open-Source Production RAG
- →🔄 Agentic RAG in Production
- →🌐 Domain-Adapted RAG with Fine-Tuning
Cohort 1
completedDec 2023 – Feb 2024
All in on AI Engineering!
New Additions
- •The foundational bootcamp that started it all
- •Comprehensive introduction to AI Engineering principles
- •Building blocks for LLM applications
- •Core RAG and agent concepts
Key Highlights
- →Inaugural cohort establishing the curriculum foundation
- →Introduction to production AI Engineering
- →Community building and peer learning established
Want to join the next cohort and experience these updates firsthand?