01
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI
Get a model to do what you actually meant. Also: read a passage for the devices it uses on you.
You leave with a reusable system prompt and a rubric for your own drafts.
The AI Creative · I make art.
You already make the work.
What you want is the studio around it.
5 studio classes. 22h recorded. exercises, tools, and written curriculum. You never open a terminal.
5
classes
3
upcoming sessions
22
hours recorded
Which sounds like you?
Before you start anything
How long will this actually take you?
Most unfinished work stopped because nobody ever counted the hours in it. Pick the shape of what you want to make, say how many hours a week you really have, and read the answer. Every assumption in it is yours to change. Your inputs stay here: the counting runs in this browser, and the hour count is saved in it.
What could you make?
Pick the shape. See how long.
hrs/wk
AI does the first draftEvery word is mine
The climb
What you walk out able to do
Every line below is something you can go and do afterwards, and the rung it sits on is how far into the studio it is. Say how many hours you have and watch where they reach — or pick the studio days yourself and see what they come to.
5
points to spend
50 hours · 0 still unspent
Spend it. Each class costs what it really takes.
1
direct the output
4 of 4 open
- execute a first touch outbound sequence on schedule
- locate a claim in its primary source
- locate the devices a passage uses on you
- name an audience and its success criterion
2
build your pipeline
17 of 21 open
- configure an assistants memory and outside connections
- elicit output from a model
- operate a boundary on unpaid work
- operate a model as a first pass editor
- operate a no code automation that calls a model
- operate a recorded decision so a later branch depends on it
- operate concurrent strands that surface at the right time
- operate named states instead of magic numbers
- operate state so a branching story neither explodes nor rails
12 more on this rung
- produce a budget for work whose timeline you have observed
- produce a playable story from a running skeleton
- produce a reusable system prompt
- produce a rubric a model can apply
- produce an account of the gap between ideals and operating values
- produce an explanation that survives a hostile reading
- produce combinations that clash on purpose
- produce the three numbers your life costs
- publish a story to a public shelf and get it played
- segment text into tokens and cost it
- transform a linear story into chained diamonds
- transform naive hours into billable capacity
3
read the audience
11 of 13 open
- characterise a plans weaknesses with adversarial review
- characterise how a claim degrades as it is retold
- characterise how a style works on a reader
- characterise what of a generated artifact you can defend as yours
- classify visitors into segments by observed behaviour
- classify where AI can fill a shape and where it must not choose one
- classify which of your offerings can reach thrive not just survive
- generalise a reasoning prompt pattern
- generalise a tool interface for model use
4 more on this rung
- generalise a worked example into something you reuse
- parameterise a prompt template
- parameterise an agent persona
- parameterise an offering backwards from its floor
4
challenge the frame
5 of 7 open
- falsify a blended voice by looking for its sources
- hold several audience models on one surface
- justify a price when the buyer pushes back
- justify a story structure that fits what you want to say
- measure whether an explanation changed what people did
- verify separate identities do not leak into each other
- verify the reach you have supports the rate you set
5
compose the work
2 of 4 open
- construct a multi agent conversation with turn taking
- design a channel that reaches people who are not looking for you
- design an agreement that says what happens when it goes wrong
- design an offer for one segment end to end
6
run the studio
4 of 4 open
- govern a swarm by information hierarchy
- reconcile agents from different toolchains into one run
- synthesise a long work that stays consistent across many generations
- synthesise an agent that carries notes across its own runs
3 of these 5 classes fit in 43 hours, and they open 43 of the 53 things above, as far up as run the studio.
Start solo
$250/month
That opens the recordings, the exercises and the written curriculum on this path, and the standups every week. $500 a month adds a seat in every class on it that runs this month.
What a point is. Ten hours of your time — the recordings you watch, the exercises you work through, and the session itself. Move either slider, or pick the classes yourself and see what the hours come to.
Schedule
3 sessions coming up
October 2026
12
Mon
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI
10:00 am Pacific
· next up
24
Sat
The Interactive Fiction Intensive
10:00 am Pacific
November 2026
6
Fri
Practical Propaganda
10:00 am Pacific
Make & Do runs Mon-Thu at 9:00 Pacific in between, so there's a room every week. Every one of these days is recorded, and the 22.4 hours already in the archive open the day you join.
Start solo $250/month
🛡️
Defender Package
Protect your work and identity
4 live sessions · 7 tools · recordings
$400 suggested
$400 suggested
🔓
Independence Package
includes Defender
Own your creative tools
7 classes · cyberdeck build · self-hosting · security
$750 suggested
$750 suggested
Add on anytime — keeps your current path. One-time purchase, classes yours to keep.
What you take, in order
Five classes. Each one stands on the last.
You learn to work a model before you build anything with one. You build a structure before you try to move anybody with it. And you price the work before you decide what the work is, so the idea you commit to is one you can afford to finish. Under each one is what it actually is, and what you leave with.
02
The Interactive Fiction Intensive
Come in with an idea, leave with something a stranger can play.
You leave with a playable branching story, published.
03
Practical Propaganda
Name an audience, write something that survives a hostile reading, measure whether it worked.
You leave with a campaign that holds up under scrutiny, and a way to measure it.
04
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
Your floor rate, your budget, your offering — before you pick the idea.
You leave with your floor rate, your budget, and an offering priced from both.
05
Founding Federation: Build With Your Heart First
A cohort room and an outbound sequence on a schedule.
You leave with an outbound sequence on a schedule, and a timeline you have watched with your own eyes.
What you get, and keep
A bench, not a playlist.
The tools that come with this path. Here is what each of them is for.
For the story
Seven pieces of apparatus for the studio day
- A companion that runs the day with you, prompt by prompt
- A workbook you fill in as the story takes shape
- A catalogue of story shapes to pull from
- A composition guide for putting those shapes together
- A structure atlas for when you want to steal a shape that already works
- An authoring toolkit for writing with a model without losing your own voice
- A reflection journal, for after — the part most people skip
For the audience
A guided campaign builder, and 8 decks
The campaign builder is one of the guided tools here: it takes you from “who is this for” to a first touch you can actually send, one screen at a time.
- 8 decks on framing, platform ecosystems, persona stacks and how a claim travels
- A security primer for people whose work makes them visible
For the money
Two guided benches and exercises
- A pricing bench that builds an offering backwards from its floor and holds the line when a buyer pushes back
- A social budget that starts from the three numbers your life costs
- exercises across the five classes — 24 of them in the money week alone
For the weeks in between
Rooms with people in them
- Make & Do — Mon-Thu, 9:00 Pacific. You show up with the thing you are stuck on and leave having moved it.
- The standups, every week, on either plan — the reason this is not a subscription to watching alone
- Live hours in every class, with the person teaching it in the room with you — that is what the $500 plan adds, and you can come back to a studio day you liked every time it runs
- 22.4 recorded hours of Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI to rewatch at 2am when a draft will not behave, and every recording after them
The idea the intensive is built on
Stories are made of five shapes.
Branch, gate, loop, braid, hub. Every interactive story you have played is those five composed in some order. Assemble one below and watch the arithmetic: passages you have to write against playthroughs you get back, and the moment where you stop tracking paths and start tracking what your reader has already done.
The story-shape composer
Click a shape to add it to the end of the structure. Click a piece in the strip to remove it. Stack up to eight — further than any first story goes — and watch what each one buys you.
Start, then a two-way branch that reconverges, a gate on a decision you recorded earlier and a loop you may re-enter up to three times, then the end.
11passages you have to write
16distinct playthroughs it yields
2state variables you have to track
1.5playthroughs per passage written
Every shape here is on the syllabus of The Interactive Fiction Intensive, along
with the two capabilities this is really about — transform a linear story into chained
diamonds and operate state so a branching story neither explodes nor rails. The
shape catalogue and the composition guide come with the day.
Two doors down the hall
Two people belong on a different path — and both of them are here.
If what you actually enjoy is building the tool — the pipeline, the agent, the thing that generates — more than making the work it generates, there is a path that goes all the way into the machinery. Same school, same standups, more terminal.
→ Take The AI Builder
If the point is to change how a lot of people think, and the art is mostly the delivery mechanism, there is a path built for exactly that. It goes further into distribution and reach than this one does, and the Weird Internet Wizard path is built for that instinct.
→ Take The Weird Internet Wizard
This path is for the person who wants the work to be theirs at the end of it — your voice, your structure, your price — with the model doing the parts that were never the point. If that is the sentence you have been trying to say out loud, you are on the right page.
Come and make something on a Saturday.
The next studio day is The Interactive Fiction Intensive, Saturday 24 October. The room that carries the weeks in between is Make & Do, Mon-Thu at 9:00 Pacific. Recordings update as classes run again. You leave with work, not notes: a playable story, a campaign that holds up, and a rate.
$250 a month opens 22.4 recorded hours, exercises, tools and the standups every week. $500 a month adds the room while it runs. Both renew monthly and you cancel either one yourself. Anything you finish stays yours.