Your first break in AI — a free, open cohort to learn by doing.
Live site: cohort.bubblnet.com · Cohort 01: 1 May 2026 – 30 June 2026 (2 months)
Free, community-driven cohort to upskill in training, inference, and AI product building. No applications, no prerequisites. Follow the roadmap, build in the open, and let your work speak for itself.
- Lesson 0 (intro): Welcome to First Break AI on YouTube · or watch with the interactive transcript on the site
- Full playlist: First Break AI on YouTube
The cohort is structured as a scroll-driven storyboard with an AI-narrated podcast for each scene:
- Ship something real — set up your blog, push your first commit, build the habit.
- See inside the machine — local inference, tokens, attention, what an LLM actually does.
- Think at production scale — APIs, evals, latency, cost, the production mindset.
- Train your own — fine-tuning, distributed training, nanoGPT speedrun on real GPUs.
- Ship a product — turn your model into something people can use.
- Prove it — capstone, public artifact, your first break.
You don't need a specific degree. You need a starting point. This cohort is for students, professionals, career switchers, and the simply curious — anyone who wants their first real break in AI. Most learning is self-directed and peer-supported; the roadmap, checklist, and resources are open so you can contribute and others can follow.
Open the live site and work through these in order:
| Step | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Watch the intro | Lesson 0 |
| 2 | Read the path | Roadmap |
| 3 | Create accounts | Checklist — Hugging Face, GitHub, Cursor, Modal, W&B |
| 4 | Set up your tools | AI Setup — Cursor / Claude Code, ChatGPT, Open Router, Modal, E2E Networks |
| 5 | Join the community | Discord — where the cohort lives |
Office hours: every Friday, 9:00 – 10:00 PM IST. Meeting link is shared on Discord. Past sessions and notes live at cohort.bubblnet.com/office-hours.
Hi, I'm FireHacker. I'm running this cohort in the open as a way to help people get their first real break in AI without paywalls, applications, or gatekeeping.
- Blog & TIL: thefirehacker.github.io
- GitHub: @thefirehacker
- X / Twitter: @thefirehacker
- About page on the site: cohort.bubblnet.com/about
This entire site — lessons, transcripts, blog, office-hours notes, infra — is open source. If something's wrong or could be better, open a PR.
- Live site: https://cohort.bubblnet.com
- Repo: https://github.com/thefirehacker/firstbreakai
- Contribute: CONTRIBUTING.md — how to propose changes, add roadmap items, fix typos.
- License: Apache 2.0.
Office hours transcripts and cohort material are used to generate AI podcast lessons and summaries published on the site and in The Journey. All learner names are anonymized — no real names are used. By participating in office hours, you consent to your contributions being used in this way.
This README is for learners. If you're forking the repo, hosting your own version, or contributing infrastructure changes:
- DEVELOPMENT.md — local preview, Cloudflare deploy, Journey Player audio/transcripts on R2, CORS policy.
- SEO-Explained.md — plain-English walkthrough of the clean-URL setup and post-render scripts.
- CONTRIBUTING.md — contribution guidelines.