ai-terminal-course

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AI Terminal Course

Understand what your AI tools are actually doing. 14 hands-on modules. Terminal only. No videos, no slides.

Quick Start

# Works instantly — no API key needed:
npx ai-terminal-course

# Or install globally:
npm install -g ai-terminal-course
ai-terminal

That's it. The course runs in demo mode by default with simulated API responses. To use real OpenAI APIs (optional, ~$10 total):

mkdir -p ~/.ai-terminal-course
echo "OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-your-key" > ~/.ai-terminal-course/.env

Get an API key: https://platform.openai.com/api-keys

What You'll Learn

Tier 1 — Build Something Now

  1. Your First LLM Call — Make a real API call, understand what comes back
  2. Prompt Engineering — Few-shot, chain-of-thought, templates that work
  3. Streaming Responses — Real-time token-by-token output
  4. Structured Outputs — Get JSON back, validate with schemas
  5. Tool Calling — Let LLMs call your functions

Tier 2 — Understand the Engine

  1. Tokens, Cost & Context — How LLMs see text, what it costs, why they forget
  2. Embeddings & Semantic Search — Turn text into vectors, find similar things
  3. RAG: Chat With Your Data — Retrieval-augmented generation + chunking strategies
  4. Agentic Patterns — ReAct, planning, multi-step reasoning

Tier 3 — Ship to Production

  1. Evals & Testing — Test suites, quality metrics, LLM-as-judge
  2. Guardrails & Safety — PII detection, content filtering, prompt injection defense
  3. Cost Optimization & Caching — Model routing, semantic caching, 90% cost reduction
  4. Monitoring & Observability — Logs, traces, alerts, incident response

Tier 4 — Graduate

  1. Capstone: Ship It — Build a complete Document Q&A system

Who This Is For

  • You can code (any language)
  • You're comfortable with the terminal
  • You have zero AI/LLM knowledge (perfect starting point)

Demo Mode vs Real Mode

Demo Mode Real Mode
Setup npx ai-terminal-course Set OPENAI_API_KEY
Cost Free ~$10 total
Responses Simulated (labeled) Real OpenAI API
Best for Exploring the course Full learning experience

Demo mode responses are clearly labeled [DEMO MODE - simulated response] so you always know what's real.

Time & Cost

  • Duration: ~7 hours (14 modules, ~30 min each)
  • API cost: Free (demo mode) or ~$10 (real APIs)
  • Prerequisites: Node.js 18+

Commands

# Start the course:
ai-terminal-course

# Jump to a specific module:
ai-terminal-course 5

# See your progress:
ai-terminal-course

Progress Tracking

Progress saves locally to ~/.ai-terminal-course/progress.json. Optionally sign in with GitHub to back it up.

Development

git clone https://github.com/josharsh/ai-terminal-course.git
cd ai-terminal-course
npm install
npm start

License

MIT

Stop reading. Start building.

Readme

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