Happy Operators AI Cohort
Nothing held the week together except Friday's deadline, no curriculum and no shared stack.
The question I was chasing
Could five people learn to build agents without any of them building the same thing?
Most AI training solves the hard part by removing it: one stack, one worked example, one pipeline everyone copies. That produces five people who can rebuild the demo and none who can build for their own business. Happy Operators wanted the opposite. The question I took into the week was whether facilitation alone could carry five people, at five different levels, to five different working things, with no curriculum holding it together.
The constraints
The spread was the constraint. One member turned up with an agent system already half built and wanted evals, optimisation and someone to hold them to a deadline. Another had never installed a command-line tool and needed a one-to-one before they could run a single command on their own machine. The same session cannot serve both.
A week is also short enough that a wrong turn on Tuesday is not recoverable. Whatever each person started had to be small enough to finish and real enough to matter to their business. That call had to be made with them on day one, not discovered on Thursday.
The decisions that mattered
Personal projects, not a shared exercise. Everyone built for their own business, so nobody could copy anyone and everybody had to make their own calls. It also meant five different stacks in one room. Agents on people's own cloud infrastructure, agents running locally, and agents assembled from off-the-shelf parts like Claude Code inside Claude Desktop wired to Apify.
Two channels, not one. Daily group check-ins for momentum and for seeing each other's problems, one-to-ones for anything that mattered to only one person, office hours and async support in between. Debugging one person's install in a group call wastes four people's afternoon.
A demo day at the end, announced at the start. The deadline did more work than any lesson could have. It set the scope for everyone: not the most impressive thing you can imagine, the most useful thing you can show on Friday.
Built with: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Apify, self-hosted cloud agents, local runtimes
Where it landed
All five demoed on Friday. The one who arrived with a half-built system left with its evals planned and its next moves decided. The one who arrived without a command line left with a working pipeline on their own machine and knew how to extend it.
What I did not plan for was how much of the week came from the group, not from me. Five people building different things in parallel, watching each other get stuck in the check-ins, turned out to be its own teacher. That is the part I would design for more deliberately next time, and it is the one thing a recorded course cannot reproduce.
Part of the Rolling Waves work archive.