Something new, starting today
If you’re working through the 180-Day AI & ML Curriculum — or you’ve followed along this far — you already know how this newsletter works. Daily lessons, real code, no fluff. Lesson 180 of that curriculum wraps up on August 1, 2026.
Starting today, there’s a second track running alongside it: AI Reliability Engineering.
What it is
A 90-day build: a production-grade, multi-agent RAG system, built completely in the open, two lessons a week, every lesson shipping with working code.
The 180-day curriculum takes you from zero to being able to build an AI system. This course picks up from there — it’s about what happens after you ship something: how you evaluate it, deploy it safely, keep it observable, control its cost, and keep it reliable once real users are hitting it. That’s the gap most courses don’t cover.
What we build
Five coordinated agents — query understanding, retrieval, synthesis, a critic, and response formatting — wired into one working pipeline. Not a toy demo. A real system with real failure modes, measured and fixed in public.
Phase 0 (Days 1–12): Build the system from scratch. Ingestion, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, the full multi-agent pipeline, and a baseline read on how it actually breaks. All 12 lessons are free.
After Day 12, the course goes deep on production concerns: evaluation engineering (Days 13–31), deployment safety (32–48), observability and audit trails (49–66), cost governance (67–78), advanced reliability patterns (79–83), closing with a full capstone deployment (84–90).
Every lesson includes:
A working, tested code package — not pseudocode
A full written breakdown of the design decisions and trade-offs
Diagrams showing the architecture and where we are in the 90-day arc
The schedule
New lessons publish every Monday and Thursday, starting Day 1 shortly after this post.
Days 1–12: free, permanently. No rush to catch up before a paywall closes.
Days 13–90: paid.
Who this is for
Anyone who finished the 180-day curriculum and wants the next step — the production-reliability side of AI engineering
Engineers with a working RAG or multi-agent system who need it to hold up under real traffic, not just in a demo
Anyone who learns better from working code and real failure logs than from slide decks
You don’t need to have finished the 180-day course to start this one — Phase 0 assumes no prior lessons from this newsletter, just general familiarity with building software.
A note on paid
Days 1–12 stay free forever. From Day 13, lessons are for paid subscribers, under the same plans as the rest of the newsletter:
Plan Price Includes Monthly $39/month - Full curriculum access, private GitHub repo
Annual $279.30/year - Same, plus free ebook + 1 month systemdrd.com portal access
Lifetime Access $699/year - Unlimited access to entire course library, past/present/future
Free$0 - Basic free lessons only, no private repo access
First lesson
Day 1 — the architecture lesson, why the system is shaped the way it is before a single line of implementation code — publishes shortly.
Subscribe (free through Day 12) and follow the code on GitHub. See you in Day 1.