PKAI Course
Introduced by: Pete Kaminski
Depth: Medium thread
Pete's course, "Agentic AI with Pete," is in its final week at the time of this call. It's been an experimental, prototype course with a wide range of students.
The Conversation
Pete described the course's evolution:
Pete: "I'm delivering the course and figuring out what the course is supposed to be on the fly, which has confused everybody all to hell."
A TA had advised him to develop curriculum first: record videos, build materials, then ship. Pete couldn't do it that way after trying for 2–3 years.
The course split into two parts:
- Plenary Sessions — became just a "switching hub" for announcements and big-picture discussion
- Field Trips — topical office hours that became the real teaching space
Students who only attended plenaries were "starving for weeks" without realizing the content had moved to field trips.
Pete: "This was the week when some people realized, oh, wait, you mean you have recordings of all of that, and I can use Claude to go through the recordings and pick out what is important to me."
Student Range
The course skews non-technical, with ages from ~25 to 70+:
Pete: "Some of the 70-year-olds are kick-ass. They actually get it, and they're super smart, and they're doing programming stuff that they never thought they would be able to do."
The Knowledge Base
The course wiki has grown to ~1,200 pages:
Pete: "We've got this massive database of how to do stuff with Cloud... it's so big that you can't find anything in it now."
Pete had Freya generate a Course Topic Finding Guide — 7,000 words of organized pointers into the wiki.
Related
- Field Trips — where the real teaching happens
- Plenary Sessions — the hub sessions
- Putting Claude on Rails — the core methodology Pete teaches
- Tim Bonnemann — student example
- What's a File — Danielle's story about basic computer literacy
- Course Topic Finding Guide — finding guide for the 1,200-page wiki
- Jankifiers — early AI teaching tools from a previous course
Pages that link to this page
- Conversation Flow
- Freya
- Pete Kaminski
- Dave's Course Marketing Ideas
- Alphabetical Index
- PKAI Starter Helper
- Tim Bonnemann
- Concept Index
- Obsidian as a Tool Ecosystem
- Library of Congress TGM
- Kaliya
- Field Trips
- Course Topic Finding Guide
- README
- Danielle
- What's a File
- The Agent Economy
- Structured Data vs Structured Interactions
- Putting Claude on Rails
- Plenary Sessions