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.

Run locally

This is an Astro static site. It builds to dist/ and ships no runtime dependencies.

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, and skills-review
• 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, and submitted-skills/
• 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
• skills/ — reusable design and rules-case-study skills
• vote-service/ — small Go API + Kubernetes manifests backing the skills-review vote widget (see vote-service/README.md)
• 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 — vote-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). See vote-service/README.md for the API, the anti-abuse design, and the build/push/deploy steps; src/pages/skills-review.astro sets window.SKILLS_REVIEW_VOTE_API to point at it once deployed.

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 skills/. Use editorial-playbook when adding chapters or sections, and rules-case-study when turning repository controls into a source-linked teaching page.