level-3-advanced/README.md

Level 3 — Advanced

You are: a builder. You will become: a systems designer — shipping AI to real users with SLOs, handling incidents, drift, adversarial inputs, and cost at scale. Typical time: 4–6 months.

Prerequisites

• Level 2 exit criteria met
• Have shipped software to real users before (not necessarily AI)
• Comfortable with observability tools (metrics, traces, logs)
• Access to a production environment or willingness to build one

Exit criteria

• You've shipped an AI product or feature to real users with SLOs met
• You've orchestrated a multi-agent workflow in production
• You've handled a real drift or incident (or run a realistic dry-run)
• You've done a model bake-off with a data-driven decision
• You've hardened one workflow against adversarial input
• For companies: full observability, incident response tested, cross-department scaling underway

Tracks

• individual/ — 14 modules for production systems design
• company/ — 10 modules for AI operations at organizational scale
• shared/ — production checklist and templates
• eli10/ — plain-language companions

How to work Level 3

Level 3 is about shipping. Every module ends with "did you ship the thing?" Not "did you read about it."

1. Pick one Level 2 project and take it to production (01, 06)
2. Add observability and SLOs before customers touch it
3. Run a bake-off before you commit to a model (08)
4. Red-team it (05)
5. Write the incident playbook before you need it (04)
6. Deepen everything with the remaining modules

If you finish this level, you can lead an AI product or platform.