level-5-frontier/README.md

Level 5 — Frontier

You are: a practitioner. You will become: a contributor to the field — original research, novel systems, category-defining products, open-weight training, foundation infra, or mechanistic interpretability. Typical time: ongoing, indefinite.

Prerequisites

• Level 4 exit criteria met
• A point of view on where the field is going
• Access to a research community, employer, or funding path
• Comfort with uncertainty and long time horizons

Exit criteria

Level 5 doesn't have exit criteria in the usual sense. You're contributing to the field. The question is not "did I finish" but "did I move the state of the art forward, even a little."

• You've contributed original work: a paper, a novel system, a widely-used tool, or open-weight training
• You engage with the research community
• You have a point of view on where the field is going and act on it
• For companies: category-defining product, open-source contributions, industry-recognized capability

Tracks

• individual/ — 10 modules toward original contribution
• company/ — 6 modules for frontier lab operations
• shared/ — research templates
• eli10/ — plain-language companions

How to work Level 5

Level 5 is aspirational and non-linear. The map is a compass, not a checklist.

1. Read papers seriously (01) and reproduce results
2. Pick one or two areas where you'll go deep (02, 03, or 04)
3. Publish or ship something original (06, 07)
4. Engage the community — reading, commenting, contributing
5. Build your own agenda over years, not months

If you engage seriously with this level, you become someone the field takes seriously back.