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 step-by-step roadmap:
- 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 | Start building | FBA Lab — hands-on AI system work, no GPU required |
Office hours: every Friday, 9:00 – 10:00 PM IST. 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.
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, CORS policy.
- SEO-Explained.md — plain-English walkthrough of the clean-URL setup and post-render scripts.
- CONTRIBUTING.md — contribution guidelines.