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Learning Tracks — the T1→T4 map
Four tracks carry you from never having built a loop all the way to designing and governing loop fleets. And you graduate each one by building, never…
Four tracks carry you from never having built a loop all the way to designing and governing loop fleets. And you graduate each one by building, never by reading.
The hook
A colleague corners you: "I finished the intro — am I qualified to put a loop on our production repo?" The honest answer is never a page count. It's an exit assessment: show me the loop you built, its stopping condition, and who checks its work. Tracks exist to turn that fuzzy question into a concrete, gradeable one.
How tracks work (plain English)
Every track is a contract with three clauses. An entry check — what you're assumed to know, verifiable in minutes, not a quiz. A body of study — pages plus labs. And an exit assessment — something you build that a rubric can actually grade. The design has one deliberate property worth pointing out: finish one track's exit, and you have already satisfied the next track's entry. There is never a gap to fall into.
The four tracks
T1 · Foundations — Beginner
| Entry check | You can use an AI coding agent by hand (or are willing to install one now) |
| You study | Prerequisites → Foundations → Part 1 (Day 2) |
| Labs | Project 1 — the watch loop |
| Exit assessment | Explain the prompting→looping shift and the six parts; run your first in-session loop |
T2 · Practitioner — Intermediate
| Entry check | You can name the six parts of a loop without looking |
| You study | Parts 2–4 (heartbeat, body, spine) + the make-your-own-loop method (Day 2) |
| Labs | Projects 2–4 |
| Exit assessment | A loop with a chosen heartbeat, a provable stopping condition, a maker/checker split, and a spine |
T3 · Engineer — Advanced
| Entry check | You've assembled a working loop of your own |
| You study | Parts 5–6, the prebuilt loop library, operating & safety (Days 2–3) |
| Labs | Projects 5–8 |
| Exit assessment | The full six-part loop built in two tools (Claude Code ↔ OpenCode), operated within a budget |
T4 · Ultra-Pro — Expert
| Entry check | You've shipped at least one loop others rely on |
| You study | advanced/: hill-climbing, loopcraft, multi-loop coordination, enterprise governance (Day 3) |
| Labs | Fleet drills + the certification capstone |
| Exit assessment | The Loop Ready capstone: design, justify, and govern a multi-loop system against the rubric |
Which tools you'll touch
Every track teaches with Claude Code ↔ OpenCode shown side by side, and brings in Codex and Grok only where a mechanic genuinely differs. Before you begin, confirm your setup answers back:
claude --versionopencode --version[!NOTE] Going deeper: the tracks map cleanly onto the "lasting vs. mechanical" split. What a track certifies is the lasting layer — the shapes and the judgment. The mechanical layer (this week's flags and commands) is something you look up, never something you memorize. The distinction is drawn out in 02-foundations/mental-models.md.
Check yourself
Q: You just finished T2's exit assessment. What is the T3 entry check — and do you already pass it?
Answer
The T3 entry check is "you've assembled a working loop of your own" — which is exactly what T2's exit assessment made you build. That is the whole design at work: every exit quietly satisfies the next entry, so you never hit a placement gap.
Try With AI
Paste your current track's exit assessment into your agent and ask: "Draft the smallest plan to get me there in one week, using only this repo's pages and labs." Now do the interesting part — grade its plan against the track table above. Did it quietly drop the labs? (Reading never graduates a track. Building does.)
When it goes wrong
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Stuck mid-track, pages feel abstract | You skipped the labs | Do the track's first lab before reading any further |
| Passed the exit, but production loops still scare you | Exit was done in a toy repo only | Re-run the assessment on a real (but low-stakes) repo |
| Teammates all claim different tracks | Self-assessment drift | Treat the entry checks as a shared bar — they're verifiable in minutes |
Glossary terms used on this page: six parts, heartbeat, spine, maker/checker, Loop Ready — see 02-foundations/glossary.md.
Sources: the four-track design and entry/exit checks follow the curriculum backbone of Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1). Full attribution: resources/sources.md.