YGL Build Lab
Don't just learn AI.
Build and ship with it.
Most AI education stops at the tutorial — a working notebook and no idea what happens next. The Build Lab is for people who want something live: mentoring, workshops and guided sprints that end with a deployed product.
Taught from products, not slides
Everything in the Build Lab comes out of work that had to actually run: the vision pipeline in FitRas that fails closed instead of guessing, the fallback chain in InstaBrain that keeps search working when a service is down, the mobile builds that had to satisfy two store review processes. The lessons are the ones that only appear once something is in production.
Formats
Three ways in.
Pick by how much you already have, not by how much you already know.
Build-With-Me
1:1 · ongoingYou bring a product you're actually trying to ship. We work through it together — architecture, AI design, the parts where you're stuck — until it's live. The curriculum is your codebase.
For: Founders and developers mid-build
Workshops
Half-day · teamFocused sessions for a team on one topic: AI-assisted development workflows, agent design, RAG systems, or getting an AI feature from prototype to production safely.
For: Product and engineering teams
Ship Sprint
4 weeks · guidedA structured run from idea to a deployed application, with checkpoints. You write the code; we make sure the architecture and AI decisions hold up before they become expensive.
For: Developers who keep starting and not finishing
What gets covered
The whole distance, not just the model.
Knowing how to call an API is the easy half. The Build Lab spends most of its time on everything that has to be true before a user can rely on it.
Building with AI tools
- AI-assisted development workflows
- Claude, Cursor and Gemini in a real codebase
- Prompting for engineering work, not demos
- Reviewing and trusting AI-written code
AI engineering
- Designing AI agents that stay reliable
- RAG and knowledge systems
- Evaluation harnesses and guardrails
- Model selection, cost and latency
Product engineering
- Product architecture that survives features
- APIs and database design
- Authentication, payments and billing
- MVP scoping without overengineering
Getting it shipped
- Production deployment and monitoring
- Mobile builds from a web codebase
- App Store and Play Store submission
- Rescuing your own stalled project
Straight talk
What this isn't.
It isn't a course with a certificate
There's no cohort schedule, no video library and nothing to complete. The measure is whether your thing is live.
It isn't a bootcamp
You need to be able to write code already, or be willing to. We work on architecture and AI decisions, not syntax.
It isn't passive
You write the code. We make sure the decisions underneath it hold up before they get expensive to reverse.
It isn't a job guarantee
The Build Lab is new and we're not going to pretend otherwise with alumni counts or placement statistics we don't have.
Build Lab
Got a project you keep not finishing?
Bring it. That's the curriculum.