Uncommon Waters
Academy
← 101 BuildWeek 2 · Nov 16 – Nov 20

Off local

GitHub, Vercel, and the build loop

The local project is in the student's GitHub repo, hosted on Vercel, transcripts landing in the repo, and every change since goes through a pull request with a preview the buddy clicked.

Monday · 90 minutes live

  1. 15′Frontier failure, live: a vague ask ('make office hours clear'), the agent declares done on half. Then an agent that loops. When to start a new chat and shrink the ask.
  2. 30′Sign up together: GitHub (email verified, 2FA), Vercel with GitHub. Staffer sends org invites as handles arrive. Publish the local folder to GitHub from Cursor, import to Vercel, open the URL on a phone. Install the transcript shuttle; week-1 chats backfill.
  3. 30′The build loop: branch, ask, look at the preview, pull request, merge. Reading a diff at skim level: which files changed, does that match what I asked.
  4. 15′Buddy: open the partner's live URL on a phone and comment on one preview. Habit change: every session now ends with a push.

Tuesday to Thursday · you build

  • 3+ pages, built across five or more PRs.
  • Every PR has a preview link the buddy clicked and commented on.
  • Move PRODUCT.md into issue #1; keep the file.

Office hours · two 30-minute blocks

  1. 1Tuesday: accounts, publishing to GitHub, Vercel imports.
  2. 2Thursday: broken previews; reading the diff together.

Exam whisper · five minutes of vocabulary

OpenAI Academy AI Foundations, first half. Exam Whisper: zero-shot vs. few-shot, chain-of-thought / reasoning models, multimodal.