Six weeks, one support-desk agent, numbers you measured yourself.

Every week has the same shape: Read, See, Build, Measure, Decide, Submit. You never scaffold a new project after Week 0. Each week names one lesson; every build item is core (needed for it, checked by the gate) or stretch (shown to your mentor, never blocking).

flowchart LR
  A["Read
the concept, 1 h"] --> B["See
the scripts, 0.5–2 h"]
  B --> C["Build
5–7 h, any assistant, logged"]
  C --> D["Check
make check WEEK=N"]
  D --> M["Measure
make evidence WEEK=N"]
  M --> E["Decide
decisions/week-N.md"]
  E --> F["Submit
PR: checks"]
  F --> G["merge
hidden evaluation, mentor's brief"]

• Read: one page, one sentence you must be able to say back in your own words, a few diagrams and a short reading list. Write the sentence in reflections/week-N.md, Q1.
• Run: one or two small scripts and a few files to read. Change nothing yet.
• Build: what the week asks for, specified as behaviour that must hold, not as a list of functions. Use any assistant you like, and log it in ai-use/week-N.yml as you go.
• Check: make check WEEK=N, as often as you like. Green is the goal, not the end.
• Measure: make evidence WEEK=N runs the week's measurements on a real model and keeps them in evidence/week-N.json, with the commit, provider and model.
• Decide: decisions/week-N.md, the one decision of the week, with the numbers from the evidence file. The gate checks that they match.
• Submit: a pull request from week-N to main, 24 hours before a session. The checks run. Merging it is what marks the week done: within a day the programme collects the data for your mentor's brief from what you merged and, from week 2, runs its hidden evaluation on questions you never see.

Your route (start, core or pro) is set by your mentor at discovery from two questions, in order: can you do the basic work of the track at all; and do you check what you produce. It holds for the programme, with one correction point at session 2. The route changes what you are given, never what is measured:

You make your repository from your route's template, so it holds that route and no other; each week's routes/ page says what it means for the week. If the route is corrected at session 2, the programme opens a pull request on your repository that swaps the files for the weeks still ahead.

Mentor time is four sessions, and nothing else except up to two fifteen-minute unblock calls. That is the framework's rule, and it is what makes the route matter: the sessions are where the hours go, so what they are spent on depends on where you started.

From session 2, every session has a half where you drive your own AI assistant on something unseen while your mentor watches how you steer it, and a half with tools closed. Interviews now have both kinds of round.

Weeks 2, 4 and 5 have no session: the gate, the self-tests and this page are your feedback, and your mentor passes on the hidden evaluation's totals. Your mentor reads a one-page brief built from each week you merge (they do not read your diff) and gives a one-click verdict: on track, something to probe at the next session, or an offer of an unblock call.

Unblock calls: up to two, fifteen minutes each, on request, after you have attempted the thing yourself. Send what you tried with the request.

Where the hours go, by route:

Three layers of evidence, from cheapest to most human. None of them is self-reported.

Work reaches your mentor a day early, so the session is not spent finding out what is there. You talk more than your mentor, because otherwise the hour drifts into them solving the problem.

Understanding sets a ceiling: at the Defence your mentor judges whether you can explain your own work, and that judgement caps what the programme records; it never adds to it. You are always shown what you produced and what it missed. You are never shown the measure that goes to the programme, and neither is this page. The self-tests here are yours alone.