Executive Summary
AI Fluency for Developers
A two-track, ten-day program that breaks the copy-paste "chat habit" and turns developers into engineers who direct AI agents instead of hand-typing around them — with every gain measured against each developer's own Day 1 baseline, not an industry average.
2
one-week tracks
10
instructional days
24
developers per cohort
70%
hands-on lab time
Expected Productivity Outcomes
Deliberately conservative targets, measured against each developer's own pre-program baseline — not absolute industry numbers.
Quality gate
Holdout pass rate — the % of agent-generated code passing hidden validation on first submission — is held flat or improving throughout. It's the check that keeps every other number honest: any drop here cancels out gains elsewhere.
These are the targets nTier Training is proposing for this engagement, not results pulled from a prior cohort. Baselines are captured on Day 1 so every improvement is specific and defensible to your codebase and workflows.
What Makes It Different
- Built like a flight simulator, not a lecture hall — two full-time instructors run each cohort as Code Factory Site Reliability Engineers, watching team workflows in real time rather than presenting slides.
- The "Hands Off Keyboard" rule — if a developer is hand-typing something an agent should handle, an instructor calls it out on the spot.
- A live token-efficiency leaderboard turns disciplined prompting into a team competition.
- Cold-call showcases — any team can be picked to open their actual prompt log and defend how they got there.
- Instructors intentionally inject live system disruptions in Week 2 to test whether a team's automation catches problems without a human stepping in.
What Developers Can Do After
- Curate workspace context and ship features under a disciplined token budget, instead of dumping an entire repo at a model.
- Direct an agent through a coordinated, multi-file, full-stack change without breaking existing code.
- Run an entire refactor from a terminal-based agent — no IDE hand-holding required.
- Write specifications precise enough that a headless agent can build correctly without back-and-forth.
- Design holdout validation suites that catch agents quietly gaming their own tests.
- Stand up a CI/CD pipeline that auto-merges or auto-rejects AI-generated pull requests against a hidden test suite — with zero manual code review.
Two Tracks, One Arc: Level 2 to Level 4 (with Level 5 stretch goals)
Track 1 · Week 1
The High-Agency Agentic Developer
- Breaking the chat habit & context mastery
- Multi-file orchestration (agent mode)
- Command-line autonomy (Claude Code / Aider)
- Iterative local debugging ("YOLO mode")
- Heavy reasoning models for hard problems
Track 2 · Week 2
The Software Factory & Automated Validation
- The software factory paradigm shift
- Holdout architecture & specification gaming
- Digital Twin Universe & behavioral cloning
- CI/CD 2.0 for high-volume agent commits
- Capstone: the Dark Factory simulation
1–2 week intermission between tracks — developers apply Track 1 skills to real backlog work and arrive at Track 2 with a working prototype and a defensible before/after baseline in hand.
Ready to build your AI-fluent developer bench?