Your Operator Path
How the academy actually works — tracks, quizzes, boss exams, badges, and the placement shortcut — and exactly which sequence to follow based on what you're trying to become.
You've made it through the eight lessons that make up Basic Training. Before you pick where to go next, it's worth understanding how the thing you're standing inside actually works — because the academy isn't a pile of articles in a folder. It's a structured path with checkpoints, shortcuts, and a way to prove what you've learned that actually means something.
The Shape of the Academy
The content is organized into tracks, and tracks are grouped into twelve categories — things like Getting Started, Coding Agents, Automation & Pipelines, AI at Work, and Business & Strategy. Across those categories sit dozens of tracks, each one a focused sequence of lessons on a specific skill, from the fundamentals you just finished through deep, specialized material for people going all the way to production systems.
Every lesson ends with a short quiz — a comprehension check, not a gate, just a way to make sure the idea actually landed before you move to the next one. Once you've been through every lesson in a track, that track has a boss exam: 15 questions, and you need 80% correct to pass. Clear the boss exam and you earn that track's badge.
Badges are what stack up into your progress: they feed your XP, they keep your streak alive, and once you've collected the badges a certificate requires, that certificate gets issued. None of it is symbolic — the badge only exists because you actually passed the exam for that track's material.
There are two different shortcuts worth knowing before you go any further, and they're not the same thing. The /onboarding diagnostic is a short, no-signup check across the foundational competency domains — the kind of thing you just covered in this track. It doesn't skip any lessons or unlock any boss exam; it just recommends a learning path based on how you answer, so you start in the right place instead of guessing. Per-track placement is the separate mechanism that actually lets you test out: once you're signed in, you can test out of a specific track through the placement flow. Pass it and that track's lessons get recorded as tested-out and the track itself shows as complete — but the badge still isn't automatic. You still need to pass that track's boss exam to earn it.
The whole platform runs on four tiers — free, plus, pro, and elite. Free covers the foundation you're finishing right now: everything in Getting Started, the shared AI-at-work material, and enough of a first real build to prove the ideas out. Plus is a separate, usage-focused tier for sharpening day-to-day prompting and AI habits — not a discount step toward pro, its own lane. Pro and elite go progressively deeper into production systems, orchestration, and the material built for people running AI as core infrastructure, not just a tool they reach for occasionally.
Which Sequence Fits Your Goal
Not everyone is here for the same reason, and the fastest path through the catalog depends on what you're actually trying to become. Three goals cover most people:
Builder. You want to make things — software, tools, features. Getting Started (where you are now) into Coding Agents, then into Agents & Orchestration once you're driving multi-step autonomous work regularly.
Automator. You want repetitive work to stop being your problem. Getting Started into Automation & Pipelines — the category built specifically for turning one-off tasks into standing, repeatable workflows — then into Infrastructure & Operations once those workflows need to run reliably without you watching them.
Leader. You're making decisions about how a team or a business adopts AI, not necessarily writing the code yourself. Getting Started into AI at Work, then into Business & Strategy, where the material shifts from "how do I use this tool" to "how do I make a call about this tool on someone else's behalf."
Every one of those three lanes starts in the same place you're standing right now. That's not a coincidence — the operator mindset and the coding-agent basics from Getting Started are load-bearing for all three goals, not just the builder path. You don't lose anything by finishing this track before branching.
Your Next Step
The immediate next move, right after this lesson, is AI as an Operating System at /tracks/ai-operating-system. It takes everything you've covered in Basic Training — the model landscape, what makes something an agent, operating safely and cheaply — and turns it into the operator's mental model: seeing AI as persistent, routed, and compounding, instead of a one-off query box you walk away from. That mindset shift is what makes every track after it click.
Right after that comes Getting Started with Claude Code at /tracks/claude-code-basics — the track where you install a coding agent and put the vocabulary from this track to work with your hands actually on the tool.
Bottom Line
The academy is tracks inside categories, each track closed out by a boss exam — 15 questions, 80% to pass — that earns a badge, and badges stack into XP, streaks, and certificates. The /onboarding diagnostic recommends where to start (no signup, no lesson-skipping); per-track placement is the separate, signed-in flow that actually lets you test out of a track's lessons — though the badge still needs the boss exam either way. Four tiers (free, plus, pro, elite) shape how deep the catalog goes. Pick your lane — builder, automator, or leader — knowing all three start exactly where you're standing now. Then go start /tracks/ai-operating-system, followed by /tracks/claude-code-basics, and put everything from this track to work.