i use claude code to teach me cs

I'm a year into my first job. I train models, I ship demos fast, I've built GPT-2 from scratch.

And I still couldn't tell you the difference between a thread and a process.

I skipped a lot of the basics during COVID. Coding agents made it easy to keep skipping them. The code works, the PR merges, nobody asks. Until an interviewer does: "how does your solution scale?" And I had nothing.

so i asked claude to quiz me first

Before teaching me anything, it ran a diagnostic. It turned out I thought the stack was a queue, I had bf16 and fp16 backwards, and I had no feel for numbers at all. How slow is a disk read compared to RAM? No idea.

Then it built me a course around exactly those gaps: gtadkapally.com/learn-cs

63 lessons. Memory, networking, databases, scaling, then the ML side: serving models, training, evals, RL. Every lesson works the same way. Guess a number. Build the thing. Measure it. Explain it back in plain words.

The rule I gave it was simple: if a sentence has three words I don't know, I'm lost. So every term gets defined in the margin, right where it shows up.

I read it on my phone. At work between runs, on flights, wherever.

the podcast didn't work, at first

I wanted to listen too, so it turned every lesson into a two-host podcast.

The first version was a disaster. An hour of jargon. Every number, every step, read out loud. It felt like I needed to sit down with a notebook, which defeats the point of a podcast.

So we threw it out and rewrote every episode story-first. Around 15 minutes each. Almost no numbers, no formulas. Just: what problem forced this to exist, and what's the one idea.

That turned out to be the part I use most. If you're like me and need a hook before you can focus, listen first. You get the shape of the topic in your head, and then the lesson actually lands when you sit down with it. The episodes are here.

it's for you too

I built it for me, so it talks about my DGX Spark and my ranking model. Swap in your own machine. It works the same.

The whole thing is open source. Fork it, edit the reader profile in CLAUDE.md to describe your gaps, and Claude Code writes lessons for you instead of me.

Claude writes the lessons. I still have to type the code and measure the numbers. That part is the point.