AI For Dummies

A lightweight, presentation-style field guide to AI-assisted engineering.

It explains how to combine a strong planning/review model with faster workers, reusable skills, subagent handoffs, Git worktrees, and explicit verification. An interactive field kit compares common behavior skills such as ponytail-lite, caveman, unlazy, research, debugging, and review. The skill-forge workflow covers discovery, triggers, package anatomy, progressive instructions, structural validation, and behavioral iteration. The hands-on lab provides a tiny starter project and copy-ready baseline and skill-enabled prompts for a short side-by-side exercise. An interactive model gearbox separates capability tier from reasoning effort across OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini, and every featured skill links to a pinned source with an approval-first installation prompt.

Each chapter opens with a short silent film (captions on screen, transcript on the page), and /lab/ runs small open models from Hugging Face in the browser: a chat model on WebGPU or the CPU, and an embedding model for semantic search.

Run locally

This is an Astro static site. It builds to dist/. The one runtime dependency is @huggingface/transformers, bundled into a web worker that only /lab/ loads, and only after the reader presses a load button. At that point the browser fetches the model weights from the Hugging Face Hub and the ONNX Runtime wasm from jsDelivr (pinned to the version Transformers.js was built against); both are cached in the browser. No other page fetches anything third-party at runtime.

pnpm install
pnpm run dev        # http://localhost:4321/ai-for-dummies/
pnpm run build      # writes dist/
pnpm run preview    # serves the built output

Verify the content and interaction contracts with:

pnpm run verify     # reads dist/, so build first

The full gate — astro check, astro build, verify.mjs, audit-ui.mjs, check-tokens.mjs, and the assertion-count floor — runs as:

bash .agents/scripts/gate.sh

Project structure

• src/pages/ — one file per route: the landing route map, the complete bilingual full-guide, the chapter pages, rules, skills, skills-review, lab (in-browser models), and films
• src/components/ — blocks and islands; the interactive diagrams, selectors, and the language toggle
• src/content/ — the content collections every page renders from
• src/styles/tokens.css — the design tokens
• legacy/ — the editorial visual system and the review-desk modules, not yet migrated into components. Still imported by the pages that need them; see .agents/context/architecture.md
• public/ — assets copied to the site root verbatim: fonts, the hands-on labs, submitted-skills/, and videos/ (the chapter films, EN and PT, with posters). The films are rendered by the separate ai-for-dummies-videos HyperFrames project; its render.sh writes the web copies and tools/extract-films.mjs writes src/content/films/
• docs/references/ — bundled research sources and notes
• docs/operations-guide.md — canonical SilverBullet operations and skills guide
• public/hands-on/starter/ — dependency-free Tiny Tasks exercise
• public/hands-on/rules/ — dependency-free Guardrails lab; toggles rule sources into the prompt
• .agents/skills/ — reusable design, content, verification, and rules-case-study skills
• GATES.md — acceptance ledger for the project

Publishing

The Gitea instance has a Pages Server configured to publish a repository’s pages branch under pages.marcospaulo.dev.br. pages now carries the built site — the contents of dist/ — not a copy of main. The intended site address is:

https://netcracker.pages.marcospaulo.dev.br/ai-for-dummies/

If the URL is not available yet, verify that the pages branch exists and that the repository’s pages branch exists. Gitea itself does not provide a built-in Pages server; this setup uses the instance’s separate Pages Server and Actions deployment path.

For the complete authoring, verification, publication, rollback, worktree, and skill workflow, see docs/operations-guide.md.

Reader voting on the skills-review desk

skills-review/ is static, so its "which draft would you ship?" vote widget calls a separate stateful service — a small Go API on its own pod, one vote per visitor enforced server-side by IP (a MAC address is never visible to a server across the internet, so it cannot be used). Its source no longer lives in this repository; the deployed service is unchanged. src/pages/skills-review.astro sets window.SKILLS_REVIEW_VOTE_API to point at it.

Research

See docs/references/README.md for official Claude, Codex, and Git documentation. The additional reading path bundles 12 verified articles and guides, including Medium and practitioner sources. See model routing for current provider controls and verified skill sources for commit-pinned provenance.

Rules and enforcement case study

Open /rules/ for a concise walkthrough grounded in the netcracker/interview repository. It shows how AGENTS.md, project-local skills, machine-readable repo ledgers, a UI contract ratchet, lint-staged, Husky, commitlint, specialist verifier agents, and PR review reinforce one another. Every example links to its source file in Gitea, and the page includes a copy-ready prompt for mapping the same layers in another repository.

The implementation patterns are also packaged as project-local skills in .agents/skills/. Use editorial-playbook when adding chapters or sections, and rules-case-study when turning repository controls into a source-linked teaching page.