Course checkpoint

Hosted reading edition: this is a fresh checkpoint template, not shared or automatically saved learner progress. Download progress.md for your notes.

Journey map | Course reference | First session.

The course is prepared; no learner session or model training has been completed. Advance only after the learner can demonstrate the pass gate in study.md. An assistant running code is not evidence that the learner understands it.

Resume here

Current stop: 01 · Trace the whole loop. Next action: open the first-session worksheet and begin its vocabulary sort. Last demonstrated gate: none. Evidence / notes: not recorded yet. Remaining confusion: record after the exercise.

Edit this block in progress.md in Otty after each visit. The HTML is a static reading copy, not an automatically saved progress app. The map’s save instructions show how to refresh it.

Session ledger

Session	Topic	State
01	Components, phases and state	Ready: start `first-session.html`
02	Tokenizer and chat template	Not started
03	Embeddings, shapes and output head	Not started
04	Attention, masks, positions and heads	Not started
05	Full block; encoder versus decoder	Not started
06	Prefill, decode and KV cache	Not started
07	Loss, gradients and optimizer update	Not started
08	Tiny educational pretraining	Not started
09	Base, instruct and post-training stages	Not started
10	Labels, splits and baselines	Not started
11	LoRA, templates and loss masks	Not started
12	Local smoke training and reload	Not started
13	Controlled domain adaptation	Not started
14	Failure analysis	Not started
15	Matched timing and memory comparison	Not started
16	Reproduction and teach-back	Not started

At the end of each session, record: date, material used, prediction before the experiment, observed result, artifact/configuration, remaining confusion and the precise next step. Keep machine-generated weights/data/logs under ignored runs/ or models/, not loose in the repository.