Graph engineering sits on four layers, and a graph of weak layers is just distributed failure. These four free mini-courses — five hands-on lessons each — build the foundation. Finish them, and the main course teaches the fifth layer: the graph.
Nine lessons: instructions, examples, reasoning room, structured output, the effort dial, why-not-what prompting, and the agentic fence.
Nine lessons: the attention budget, just-in-time retrieval, compaction, sub-agents, the startup ledger, the four failure modes, and delete-first discipline.
Eight lessons: tools as contracts, owned control flow, errors as context, permissions, observability, and the harness–loop–graph diagnostic.
Twelve lessons: the agentic cycle, checkable stop conditions, evidence over self-report, bounded repair, loop economics, the autonomy ramp, and the security tax.