Each lesson teaches one diagnostic move, gives you the prompt language to use it, walks through a real annotated transcript, and ends with a 30-minute exercise on your own project. No theory. Built from the live work across QC, MHG, and Parley.
Your first agent.md, your first skill, your first web page. End each lesson with a working artifact.
The instruction file your AI reads on every session. What goes in it, what doesn't.
Define a specialist. Scope, triggers, authority, tools. One file, one role.
What a skill is, when to write your own, the bootstrap pattern.
Five fields that turn fuzzy asks into concrete renders.
Voice, structure, source-pinning. The difference between a brief and a fight.
Inputs → research → structured output. The reporting loop in plain language.
Project scaffold, dev server, iterate-by-screenshot. End-to-end.
Specific language, used at specific moments, that produces outsized improvement.
The disciplines: contracts, postmortems, hooks, memory. The 13-folder vault. Routing six agents across multiple ventures.
The diagnostic that catches every kind of "finished but not really." One prompt, three patterns, one habit.
The substitution test for structural causes. Action items that ship. The close-out protocol.
MEMORY.md as an index. Four memory types. The single rule that prevents bloat.
SessionStart, PreToolUse, PostToolUse. Why hooks beat "agents must remember to."
How to add work to a contract without losing rigor. When a re-sign is required.
Communication protocols, delegation templates, authority boundaries.
Numbered folders. Single source of truth per concern. Why a markdown vault beats a SaaS stack.
Karpathy-style ingest. Page format, index pattern, lint cadence.
Frontmatter, options table, revisit conditions. Future-you reads this.
Why six is right and fourteen is too many. Authority levels, trigger words, escalation.
Retrofit a project that's already a mess. Real ROI, token spend, scope creep, multi-venture portfolio operations.
Where to start when there's no CLAUDE.md, no contracts, no postmortems, and the deadline was yesterday.
When 6 agents are right, when 1 is enough, when more agents make you slower. With numbers.
Cache health ratios. Tokens per shipped artifact. Idle days vs. uncommitted-output days.
How the three disciplines compound. Where each catches the others' failures.
The amendment protocol at scale. Refusing 'while we're in there' work. Without becoming an obstacle.
Cross-venture routing, shared agents, isolation rules. Running 3+ ventures from one operator.
Pod lifecycle decoupling. Exit-path audits. Watchdog cadences. Don't lose a 14-hour run.
The signs that your session is gradually losing accuracy. Restart hygiene that compounds.
When to build vs use existing. The protocol in plain language. The failure modes that cost teams two weeks each.
Beyond chief-of-staff routing: parallel-spawn, gather-then-merge, race-then-cancel. When each fires and when each breaks.
When an agent misbehaves in prod: the diagnostic ladder. Five rungs from "claim says done but isn't" through context drift, tool failures, schema mismatches, upstream model regressions.