Unit 0. Welcome to the course

Get settled

Every step, in the order they trip people up. Nothing here needs a paid account, an API key, or your real name.

Bookmark these

• The course as a website — everything, no install needed
• The sessions repository — the code and notebooks you run
• The submissions repository — where you hand work in
• @gecko_coach_bot — ask the course a question from your phone, no install
• This week's sessions
• llms.txt — give this to your AI assistant and it can read the whole course

Set up your machine

• Pick your terminal. macOS: Terminal. Linux: yours. Windows: Git Bash or WSL2, never PowerShell — a bash command pasted into PowerShell fails on line one and the error will not say why
• Install uv — curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh, or on Windows powershell -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"
• Install git if git --version says nothing — https://git-scm.com/downloads
• Create a GitHub account if you have none — https://github.com/signup. A pseudonymous one is fine
• Get the course:

git clone https://github.com/Gecko-Academy/dev3pack-cohort-2026-09.git
cd dev3pack-cohort-2026-09
uv run bootcamp start

• bootcamp start does the install and the check in one go. It is safe to run as many times as you like
• Stop when it says "All set." If it does not, it names the fix
• bootcamp: command not found? You are outside the course folder (cd dev3pack-cohort-2026-09), or you dropped the prefix — it is uv run bootcamp, never bare bootcamp
• Want a real model later? Optional, free, no key — set up a local one
• Stuck and nobody is awake? Ask the course itself — give it to your assistant, or run it in a terminal
• Full instructions: SETUP.md

Open a notebook

• On your machine — uv run jupyter lab, then open units/en/unit1/session-01-assistant-configuration/notebook.ipynb
• In the browser — every notebook carries an Open in Colab badge: session 1's notebook
• Run the first cell first. It checks your setup and never fails the notebook
• Sessions 1 and 10 need an assistant that edits files. Colab's cannot. Use your machine or GitHub Codespaces; the other thirteen work in Colab

Hand work in

• Fork the submissions repository — once, today. Press Fork on https://github.com/Gecko-Academy/dev3pack-submissions
• Run every cell, top to bottom. You want ✅ chNN-eN passed
• Save the notebook. The outputs only reach the file when you save, and the outputs are your evidence. Skip this and you hand in an empty notebook
• Hand it in, in one command — uv run bootcamp submit ch01 --github YOUR-LOGIN --push
• That needs the GitHub CLI — https://cli.github.com, then gh auth login. Without it the command says so and stops
• No CLI? The long way still works — uv run bootcamp submit ch01 --github YOUR-LOGIN writes the folder; copy it into your fork by hand
• Your login is the GitHub one, not a display name — it is in your profile URL
• Check it before the pull request — uv run python scripts/verify_submission.py submissions/YOUR-LOGIN/ch01
• Copy the folder into your fork, commit, push, open a pull request
• Using the gh CLI? --body is required, or it hangs waiting for input
• Green CI means accepted. Merging is automatic and nobody needs to be asked
• Submitting again replaces the earlier attempt. Nothing is locked
• Full instructions: how to submit

Every Monday

• git pull in the course folder. A week that has not opened is not in the repository yet
• Week 1 · 14 Sep — Week 2 · 21 Sep — Week 3 · 28 Sep

When git pull stops

error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge means the course updated a notebook you have edited. Nothing is lost. Put your changes aside, then pull:

git stash push -m "my work before the update"
git pull

git stash puts your changes on a shelf and deletes nothing. Work you already handed in is safe in the submissions repository too.

Want one notebook back exactly as you left it? Take back that one file:

git checkout stash@{0} -- units/en/unit1/session-05-deterministic-mini-agent/notebook.ipynb

Do not use git stash pop. It tries to merge your notebook with the updated one, and notebooks do not merge cleanly. git stash list shows what is on the shelf.

Stuck more than fifteen minutes

• Post the output of uv run bootcamp doctor in the group. Never your .env
• Somebody else has hit the same thing