The Curriculum.
The guide builds your business's foundation. This builds you. Five levels of skill, from your first serious prompt to work at the edge of the field, with a track for individuals and a track for companies at every step. Free, open, MIT licensed. Nothing is gated.
Two programs. Know which one you are holding.
Groundwork is one system with two halves, and they run on different axes. The doctrine has six standing orders: things you build once for your business, in order. The Curriculum has five levels: stages of skill you climb yourself, at your own pace. The numbers never map one to one, because they are not counting the same thing.
Everything Groundwork publishes is one of three documents. Here is each one, what it is for, and how to get it. All three are free.
| Document | What it is | How to get it |
|---|---|---|
| The Guide | The doctrine on the web: six standing orders, fifteen documents, one Operator, one loop. What you build for your business, with every template. | Read it on this site |
| The Field Guide | The same doctrine as a 29-page printable PDF. It is generated from the guide pages, so the two can never disagree. | Download the PDF |
| The Curriculum | The skill path: five levels, two tracks, from first prompts to frontier work. A different job from the doctrine. It teaches you, not your filing cabinet. | This section, GitHub, or one 613-page illustrated book |
The short version: build the orders with the guide. Climb the levels with the Curriculum. If your files are still chaos, start with the guide; the Curriculum assumes you have something for AI to work on. If your foundation stands and you want to get genuinely good, start climbing.
The five levels
Each level names where you are, where it takes you, and roughly how long the climb takes. Every level carries an Individual track and a Company track, and every technical section has a plain-language companion, so nobody gets locked out by jargon.
| Level | You are | It makes you | Typical time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Essentials | New to AI | A competent power user: the jargon, your own prompts, the right model for each task, real work shipped. | 30 days |
| 2 · Intermediate | Comfortable with AI | A builder: your own agents, RAG systems, MCP servers, evals, and cost control. | 60 to 90 days |
| 3 · Advanced | A builder | A systems designer: AI shipped to real users, incidents handled, drift caught, adversarial inputs survived. | 4 to 6 months |
| 4 · Professional | A systems designer | A practitioner: leading an AI team, custom training, applied alignment, safety engineering, red-teaming. | 6 to 12 months |
| 5 · Frontier | A practitioner | A contributor to the field: original research, novel systems, open-weight training, foundation infrastructure. | Ongoing |
Which program first?
Start with the guide if:
- Your files live in Downloads, Desktop, and email attachments
- You explain the same preferences to AI every time you open a new chat
- You have no rules for what AI may do without asking you
- You want a Day One, a scorecard, and a finished system at the end
Start with the Curriculum if:
- Your foundation stands, or you are here to learn, not to file
- You know what a system prompt is and want to get past it
- You want to build an agent, an MCP server, or a RAG pipeline
- You want evals, not vibes
Doing both, in sequence, is the whole arc: the guide gets the foundation right, the Curriculum builds the skill and the systems on top of it. The scorecard will tell you which side you should be standing on today.
Three ways to take it
On this site
The whole thing, readable right here: every level, both tracks, every module, in reading order with the same look as the rest of the site. 122 pages, nothing gated.
On GitHub
The living version: 569 plain-text files, every module, every template, every plain-language companion. Fork it, teach from it, use it inside your company. MIT.
As one book
The whole curriculum bound in reading order: 613 pages, illustrated, bookmarked, printable. A snapshot of the repo, for people who read better on paper.
Curriculum authorship credit: Jake Van Clief. Doctrine and structure: Adam Abdalla. Released MIT with no branding requirement: teach it, fork it, use it inside your own company.