BYU Strategy - Marriott School of Business

Builder Resources

Curated reading, courses, and accounts for becoming an AI product builder, organized by the six Builder axes.

A hexagon with one builder axis at each corner, clockwise from the upper left: Agentic Workflow, Discovery, Design, Launch and Learn, AI Systems, and Application Architecture, each with an icon. Faint rings inside mark levels from the center to the edge.

How to use this. Do not work through it top to bottom. Find your lowest axis on your builder profile, start with the one item marked Start here, and come back for the rest when you need it.

Verified August 2026. Anthropic moved several documentation URLs during 2025 and 2026, so older links you find elsewhere may redirect or break.

Discovery

What to build, and for whom.

Resource Format Why
Start here: The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick Book, short Corrects the most common interviewing mistake: asking questions that produce flattering lies
Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres Book Turns “talk to users” into a weekly team habit rather than a good intention
Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions, Teresa Torres Article, free The clearest free explainer of the opportunity solution tree
The Lean Product Playbook, Dan Olsen Book The cleanest operational definition of product-market fit, six steps from customer to MVP
SVPG articles, Marty Cagan Articles, free Free and still updated. Start with how strong product teams differ from feature teams
Shape Up, Ryan Singer Book, free Fixed appetite and betting instead of backlog grooming. Free full text
Lenny’s Newsletter Newsletter The highest density of practitioner tactics anywhere in product
Mental models for building products people love, Stewart Butterfield, Nov 2025 Podcast The Slack and Flickr founder on how he decides what is worth building

Create your own curated study plan from these resources. Copy this into Claude Code. It reads the sources above, finds out what you already know, and teaches against your own project rather than a tutorial app.

Context first, because you do not know any of this yet.

I am a student in a BYU course that trains AI product builders: people who
can carry an idea from a user problem to a working product that someone
actually uses, with AI as both the material and the tool.

We track six skills, called the Builder axes:

  1. Discovery, what to build and for whom
  2. Design, the surface and the flow
  3. Application Architecture, how the app is structured, shipped, and kept
     safe, including wiring a model in: API calls, retrieval pipelines, cost
     and latency
  4. AI Systems, how the models work and why they behave the way they do:
     neural networks, next-word prediction, pretraining, fine-tuning and
     RLHF, embeddings and RAG, context windows, hallucination
  5. Agentic Workflow, putting AI to work: coding agents, project
     instruction files, memory, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, reviewing
     code an agent wrote, and building AI into the product with prompts,
     tool use, agent loops, and evals
  6. Launch and Learn, instrumentation, metrics, activation and retention,
     experiments, positioning and pricing

My course gives me a builder profile, a six-sided chart scored 0 to 100 on
every axis. I am working on one axis at a time, starting with my weakest.

You are my tutor for Discovery: what to build, and for whom.

First, ask me at most four questions to find out where I actually am. Do not
skip this and do not ask more than four.

Then build me an ordered plan from the sources below, with a rough time
estimate for each step. Read each source yourself before you teach from it.

Sources:
https://www.momtestbook.com/
https://www.producttalk.org/prioritize-opportunities/
https://www.svpg.com/articles/
https://basecamp.com/shapeup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLe-zy5r0Mk

How to teach me:
- One concept per session, thirty minutes maximum. Say where we stopped.
- After each concept, give me one small exercise against my own project. Not a
  toy example. If I do not have a project yet, help me pick one first.
- Make me explain it back, or show you the work. If I am hand-waving, say so
  and stay on it.
- If a source is out of date or wrong, tell me. Do not summarize uncritically.
- Skip anything I already know. Prove it by asking, not by assuming.

We are done when I can state a real user problem, the evidence that it is
real, and the smallest thing you could build to test it, in one page.
When we get there, tell me plainly what I still cannot do.

Design

The surface and the flow.

Resource Format Why
Start here: Refactoring UI Book Written for engineers who need work to look designed without becoming designers
Laws of UX, Jon Yablonski Site, free The cognitive principles that explain why an interface works, one page each
The Definition of User Experience, Norman and Nielsen Article, free The foundational framing, from the people who coined the term
Handmade Designs: The New Trust Signal, NN/g Article, 2026 Covers the UI critique row: as AI-generated polish costs nothing, visible imperfection starts to signal trust
shadcn/ui Docs The component system agents actually write against, built to be legible to an LLM
Apple Human Interface Guidelines Docs Canonical reference for platform-native patterns and component behavior
The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it., Jenny Wen Article, 2026 Head of design at Claude on why discovery, mock, iterate is obsolete, and what taste means when prototyping is free
The Looking Glass, Julie Zhuo Newsletter Ex-Facebook VP of Design on judgment and critique culture
Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat, Figma’s CEO, Oct 2025 Podcast The argument that as building gets cheap, taste becomes the differentiator
How to build real taste, and why AI makes it matter more, Tony Fadell, Jun 2026 Podcast The iPod and Nest creator on where taste comes from and how to develop it

Create your own curated study plan from these resources. Copy this into Claude Code. It reads the sources above, finds out what you already know, and teaches against your own project rather than a tutorial app.

Context first, because you do not know any of this yet.

I am a student in a BYU course that trains AI product builders: people who
can carry an idea from a user problem to a working product that someone
actually uses, with AI as both the material and the tool.

We track six skills, called the Builder axes:

  1. Discovery, what to build and for whom
  2. Design, the surface and the flow
  3. Application Architecture, how the app is structured, shipped, and kept
     safe, including wiring a model in: API calls, retrieval pipelines, cost
     and latency
  4. AI Systems, how the models work and why they behave the way they do:
     neural networks, next-word prediction, pretraining, fine-tuning and
     RLHF, embeddings and RAG, context windows, hallucination
  5. Agentic Workflow, putting AI to work: coding agents, project
     instruction files, memory, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, reviewing
     code an agent wrote, and building AI into the product with prompts,
     tool use, agent loops, and evals
  6. Launch and Learn, instrumentation, metrics, activation and retention,
     experiments, positioning and pricing

My course gives me a builder profile, a six-sided chart scored 0 to 100 on
every axis. I am working on one axis at a time, starting with my weakest.

You are my tutor for Design: the surface and the flow.

First, ask me at most four questions to find out where I actually am. Do not
skip this and do not ask more than four.

Then build me an ordered plan from the sources below, with a rough time
estimate for each step. Read each source yourself before you teach from it.

Sources:
https://www.refactoringui.com/
https://lawsofux.com/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/handmade-designs/
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-design-process-is-dead
https://ui.shadcn.com/docs

How to teach me:
- One concept per session, thirty minutes maximum. Say where we stopped.
- After each concept, give me one small exercise against my own project. Not a
  toy example. If I do not have a project yet, help me pick one first.
- Make me explain it back, or show you the work. If I am hand-waving, say so
  and stay on it.
- If a source is out of date or wrong, tell me. Do not summarize uncritically.
- Skip anything I already know. Prove it by asking, not by assuming.

We are done when I can take a screen an agent generated for you and name
five specific things wrong with it, each with a reason a designer would
accept.
When we get there, tell me plainly what I still cannot do.

Application Architecture

How the application is structured, shipped, and kept safe.

Resource Format Why
Start here: Learn Next.js, Vercel Course, free Sixteen chapters building a real full-stack app: routing, data, auth, deploy
Supabase docs and the auth guide Docs Postgres, auth, storage, realtime in one set. The auth guide covers row level security, which most tutorials skip
Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd ed., Kleppmann and Riccomini Book, 2026 The reference for how data systems really behave. The second edition rewrites the consistency chapter and adds coverage of cloud systems
Pro Git Book, free Complete and free. Read chapters 1 to 3 and stop until you need more
Trunk Based Development, Paul Hammant Website, free How teams keep one shared main branch releasable: small branches merged within a day or two, unfinished work behind feature flags. Start with the short-lived feature branches page
The Practical Test Pyramid, Ham Vocke Article, free Unit, integration, and end-to-end tests worked through in real code, and why a suite should have many of the small ones and few of the large
Testing guide, Next.js Docs The test types for a Next.js app and setup guides for Vitest, Jest, and Playwright. Ask the agent to follow it when it sets up tests
Playwright docs Docs End-to-end tests that click through your app in a real browser. Start with writing tests and the code generator, which records your clicks as a test
OWASP Top 10:2025 Standard The 2025 edition adds software supply chain failures. If a syllabus cites the 2021 list, it is out of date
Web Security Academy, PortSwigger Labs, free Hands-on labs for the attacks OWASP describes. Reading about SQL injection is not the same as doing one
Use The Index, Luke!, Markus Winand Book, free SQL indexing for developers. Almost nothing else covers this well
The Pragmatic Engineer, Gergely Orosz Newsletter How production systems and engineering practice actually work inside real companies

Lenny’s Podcast has almost nothing on this axis. Product podcasts do not cover schema design or deploys, which is part of why it is the weakest axis across the Foundry cohort.

Create your own curated study plan from these resources. Copy this into Claude Code. It reads the sources above, finds out what you already know, and teaches against your own project rather than a tutorial app.

Context first, because you do not know any of this yet.

I am a student in a BYU course that trains AI product builders: people who
can carry an idea from a user problem to a working product that someone
actually uses, with AI as both the material and the tool.

We track six skills, called the Builder axes:

  1. Discovery, what to build and for whom
  2. Design, the surface and the flow
  3. Application Architecture, how the app is structured, shipped, and kept
     safe, including wiring a model in: API calls, retrieval pipelines, cost
     and latency
  4. AI Systems, how the models work and why they behave the way they do:
     neural networks, next-word prediction, pretraining, fine-tuning and
     RLHF, embeddings and RAG, context windows, hallucination
  5. Agentic Workflow, putting AI to work: coding agents, project
     instruction files, memory, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, reviewing
     code an agent wrote, and building AI into the product with prompts,
     tool use, agent loops, and evals
  6. Launch and Learn, instrumentation, metrics, activation and retention,
     experiments, positioning and pricing

My course gives me a builder profile, a six-sided chart scored 0 to 100 on
every axis. I am working on one axis at a time, starting with my weakest.

You are my tutor for Application Architecture: how the application is
structured, shipped, and kept safe.

First, ask me at most four questions to find out where I actually am. Do not
skip this and do not ask more than four.

Then build me an ordered plan from the sources below, with a rough time
estimate for each step. Read each source yourself before you teach from it.

Sources:
https://nextjs.org/learn
https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth
https://use-the-index-luke.com/
https://owasp.org/Top10/2025/
https://portswigger.net/web-security
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

How to teach me:
- One concept per session, thirty minutes maximum. Say where we stopped.
- After each concept, give me one small exercise against my own project. Not a
  toy example. If I do not have a project yet, help me pick one first.
- Make me explain it back, or show you the work. If I am hand-waving, say so
  and stay on it.
- If a source is out of date or wrong, tell me. Do not summarize uncritically.
- Skip anything I already know. Prove it by asking, not by assuming.

We are done when I can walk a stranger through your repo: what runs where,
what the schema is, who can see which rows, and what happens between your
machine and the live app.
When we get there, tell me plainly what I still cannot do.

AI Systems

How the models work, and why they behave the way they do: the understanding every AI feature you build depends on.

Resource Format Why
Start here: Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT, Andrej Karpathy Video, 3.5h Pretraining through hallucination, tool use, and RLHF, made for builders rather than researchers
Neural networks, 3Blue1Brown Video series, free Neural networks, gradient descent, and transformers drawn out visually, ending with how a GPT predicts the next word
Intro to Large Language Models, Andrej Karpathy Video, 1h The one-hour version: what a model is, how it is trained, and why it behaves as it does
Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), Sebastian Raschka Book, 2024 Builds a small GPT step by step: tokens, embeddings, attention, pretraining, then fine-tuning. Most of the figures in the How Models Work chapter come from it. Free code at LLMs-from-scratch
Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), Sebastian Raschka Video series, free The book’s author coding each chapter along with you. Watch it with the book, or alone to see every building block assembled
Let’s build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out, Andrej Karpathy Video, 2h Writes a small GPT in one sitting. The fastest way to see that a model is next-token prediction and nothing hidden
The Illustrated Transformer, Jay Alammar Article, free Attention and the transformer, one diagram at a time
How Models Work Chapter The course chapter: next-word prediction, training, and why the same prompt gives different answers
Context windows and prompt caching, Anthropic Docs What actually counts against the window, and the most direct way to reduce cost and latency
AI Engineering, Chip Huyen Book The standard reference for the job title. Free chapter notes at aie-book
AI Engineering 101, Chip Huyen, Oct 2025 Podcast The book’s author covering the same ground in an hour

Create your own curated study plan from these resources. Copy this into Claude Code. It reads the sources above, finds out what you already know, and teaches against your own project rather than a tutorial app.

Context first, because you do not know any of this yet.

I am a student in a BYU course that trains AI product builders: people who
can carry an idea from a user problem to a working product that someone
actually uses, with AI as both the material and the tool.

We track six skills, called the Builder axes:

  1. Discovery, what to build and for whom
  2. Design, the surface and the flow
  3. Application Architecture, how the app is structured, shipped, and kept
     safe, including wiring a model in: API calls, retrieval pipelines, cost
     and latency
  4. AI Systems, how the models work and why they behave the way they do:
     neural networks, next-word prediction, pretraining, fine-tuning and
     RLHF, embeddings and RAG, context windows, hallucination
  5. Agentic Workflow, putting AI to work: coding agents, project
     instruction files, memory, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, reviewing
     code an agent wrote, and building AI into the product with prompts,
     tool use, agent loops, and evals
  6. Launch and Learn, instrumentation, metrics, activation and retention,
     experiments, positioning and pricing

My course gives me a builder profile, a six-sided chart scored 0 to 100 on
every axis. I am working on one axis at a time, starting with my weakest.

You are my tutor for AI Systems: how the models work, and why they behave the
way they do.

First, ask me at most four questions to find out where I actually am. Do not
skip this and do not ask more than four.

Then build me an ordered plan from the sources below, with a rough time
estimate for each step. Read each source yourself before you teach from it.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI
https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTKMiZHVd_2IIEsoJrWACkIxLRdfMlw11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/context-windows

How to teach me:
- One concept per session, thirty minutes maximum. Say where we stopped.
- After each concept, give me one small exercise against my own project. Not a
  toy example. If I do not have a project yet, help me pick one first.
- Make me explain it back, or show you the work. If I am hand-waving, say so
  and stay on it.
- If a source is out of date or wrong, tell me. Do not summarize uncritically.
- Skip anything I already know. Prove it by asking, not by assuming.

We are done when I can explain, without notes, how a model turns a prompt into
an answer, why it sometimes makes things up, and when I would reach for RAG
instead of fine-tuning.
When we get there, tell me plainly what I still cannot do.

Agentic Workflow

Putting AI to work, as the way you build and inside the product you build. This axis changes fastest, so favor docs and primary sources over books.

Resource Format Why
Start here: Building Effective Agents, Anthropic Article The shared vocabulary of the field: workflows versus agents, patterns over frameworks
Claude Code documentation Docs CLAUDE.md, memory, skills, hooks, subagents, and MCP, all in one place. Note the URL moved in 2025
Anthropic Academy Courses, free Around 23 free courses with certificates, including Claude Code in Action, MCP, skills, and subagents
Agentic Engineering Patterns, Simon Willison Guide, free Six chapters on principles, testing, and annotated real prompts. The best free text on loop design
How we built our multi-agent research system, Anthropic Article Orchestrator and subagent architecture, when parallelism helps, and the token cost it carries
Writing effective tools for agents, Anthropic Article Read before you write an MCP server, not after
Model Context Protocol and AGENTS.md Specs Both are now multi-vendor open standards rather than one company’s idea
How far can we push AI autonomy in code generation?, Birgitta Böckeler Article The most rigorous treatment of where human review is still non-negotiable
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like, Simon Willison Article An honest admission that review discipline is declining, from one of its advocates
What happens after coding is solved, Boris Cherny, Feb 2026 Podcast The head of Claude Code on where agentic development is going. The most watched episode on this list
Claude Code and Cowork, Fiona Fung, Jun 2026 Podcast The follow-up, four months later, on how the workflow changed again
Tool use with Claude Docs Canonical reference for function calling and the agentic loop
Interactive prompt engineering tutorial and Claude Cookbooks Notebooks, free Runnable examples for RAG, tool use, evals, caching, and cost
Patterns for Building LLM-based Systems and Products, Eugene Yan Article, free The best overview of the field: evals, RAG, caching, guardrails, defensive UX
AI Evals email course, Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar Course, free Seventeen parts plus two free ebooks. Evals are the axis item nobody has, and this is the place to start
Effective context engineering for AI agents, Anthropic Article Context engineering as the discipline that succeeded prompt engineering
Why AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders, Hamel Husain, Sep 2025 Podcast The best introduction to why evals matter, from the person who teaches them
Agent Team Kit, BYU AI Foundry Repo Hooks, skills, and one-lesson-per-file practices from building production apps with several Claude Code agents at once. Start with the README’s comparison of the two ways to run parallel sessions, then the memory-pack folder

Create your own curated study plan from these resources. Copy this into Claude Code. It reads the sources above, finds out what you already know, and teaches against your own project rather than a tutorial app.

Context first, because you do not know any of this yet.

I am a student in a BYU course that trains AI product builders: people who
can carry an idea from a user problem to a working product that someone
actually uses, with AI as both the material and the tool.

We track six skills, called the Builder axes:

  1. Discovery, what to build and for whom
  2. Design, the surface and the flow
  3. Application Architecture, how the app is structured, shipped, and kept
     safe, including wiring a model in: API calls, retrieval pipelines, cost
     and latency
  4. AI Systems, how the models work and why they behave the way they do:
     neural networks, next-word prediction, pretraining, fine-tuning and
     RLHF, embeddings and RAG, context windows, hallucination
  5. Agentic Workflow, putting AI to work: coding agents, project
     instruction files, memory, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, reviewing
     code an agent wrote, and building AI into the product with prompts,
     tool use, agent loops, and evals
  6. Launch and Learn, instrumentation, metrics, activation and retention,
     experiments, positioning and pricing

My course gives me a builder profile, a six-sided chart scored 0 to 100 on
every axis. I am working on one axis at a time, starting with my weakest.

You are my tutor for Agentic Workflow: putting AI to work, as the way I build
and inside the product.

First, ask me at most four questions to find out where I actually am. Do not
skip this and do not ask more than four.

Then build me an ordered plan from the sources below, with a rough time
estimate for each step. Read each source yourself before you teach from it.

Sources:
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview
https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/writing-tools-for-agents
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/multi-agent-research-system
https://martinfowler.com/articles/pushing-ai-autonomy.html
https://modelcontextprotocol.io
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-use/overview
https://eugeneyan.com/writing/llm-patterns/
https://ai.hamel.dev/eval-course

How to teach me:
- One concept per session, thirty minutes maximum. Say where we stopped.
- After each concept, give me one small exercise against my own project. Not a
  toy example. If I do not have a project yet, help me pick one first.
- Make me explain it back, or show you the work. If I am hand-waving, say so
  and stay on it.
- If a source is out of date or wrong, tell me. Do not summarize uncritically.
- Skip anything I already know. Prove it by asking, not by assuming.

We are done when I can set your project up so an agent does good work in it,
review what it wrote well enough to catch what it got wrong, and put an AI
feature in your product with an eval that tells you when it is wrong.
When we get there, tell me plainly what I still cannot do.

Launch and Learn

Getting it in front of people and finding out whether it worked.

Resource Format Why
Start here: Product/Market Fit Survey, Sean Ellis Tool The 40 percent “very disappointed” test. Run it on your own product rather than reading about it
How Superhuman built an engine to find PMF, Rahul Vohra Article, free Turns that survey into a repeatable loop. They went from 22 to 58 percent
What is good retention?, Lenny Rachitsky and Casey Winters Article Benchmarks by business model. Answers the question “is our number bad”
North Star Playbook, Amplitude Playbook, free The standard reference for choosing a metric that would actually move
Obviously Awesome, April Dunford Book Positioning, which determines what activation even means
Growth Loops are the New Funnels, Reforge Article The essay that reframed growth from linear funnels to compounding loops
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments, Kohavi, Tang and Xu Book The A/B testing reference. Chapter 1 and the FAQ are free on the companion site
The new AI growth playbook for 2026, Elena Verna Article, 2026 Argues AI-native products have to re-find product-market fit every few months rather than once
Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product, Albert Cheng, Oct 2025 Podcast Duolingo and Uber growth work, concrete enough to apply right away
What world-class go-to-market looks like in 2026, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Nov 2025 Podcast Vercel and Stripe on positioning and pricing, the two rows this axis is weakest on

Create your own curated study plan from these resources. Copy this into Claude Code. It reads the sources above, finds out what you already know, and teaches against your own project rather than a tutorial app.

Context first, because you do not know any of this yet.

I am a student in a BYU course that trains AI product builders: people who
can carry an idea from a user problem to a working product that someone
actually uses, with AI as both the material and the tool.

We track six skills, called the Builder axes:

  1. Discovery, what to build and for whom
  2. Design, the surface and the flow
  3. Application Architecture, how the app is structured, shipped, and kept
     safe, including wiring a model in: API calls, retrieval pipelines, cost
     and latency
  4. AI Systems, how the models work and why they behave the way they do:
     neural networks, next-word prediction, pretraining, fine-tuning and
     RLHF, embeddings and RAG, context windows, hallucination
  5. Agentic Workflow, putting AI to work: coding agents, project
     instruction files, memory, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, reviewing
     code an agent wrote, and building AI into the product with prompts,
     tool use, agent loops, and evals
  6. Launch and Learn, instrumentation, metrics, activation and retention,
     experiments, positioning and pricing

My course gives me a builder profile, a six-sided chart scored 0 to 100 on
every axis. I am working on one axis at a time, starting with my weakest.

You are my tutor for Launch and Learn: getting it in front of people and
finding out whether it worked.

First, ask me at most four questions to find out where I actually am. Do not
skip this and do not ask more than four.

Then build me an ordered plan from the sources below, with a rough time
estimate for each step. Read each source yourself before you teach from it.

Sources:
https://pmfsurvey.com
https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/
https://amplitude.com/books/north-star/amplitudes-north-star-metric-and-inputs
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-good-retention-issue-29
https://www.aprildunford.com/books
https://experimentguide.com/

How to teach me:
- One concept per session, thirty minutes maximum. Say where we stopped.
- After each concept, give me one small exercise against my own project. Not a
  toy example. If I do not have a project yet, help me pick one first.
- Make me explain it back, or show you the work. If I am hand-waving, say so
  and stay on it.
- If a source is out of date or wrong, tell me. Do not summarize uncritically.
- Skip anything I already know. Prove it by asking, not by assuming.

We are done when I can name the one metric that would move if your product
were working, say how you would instrument it, and say what number would
make you kill the feature.
When we get there, tell me plainly what I still cannot do.

Who to follow

Moved. The accounts worth following, alongside the product management voices, are on the Thought Leaders page.