SB README.md experience.log toolkit.json config.yml projects/ journal/ credentials/

journal/7 entries

Journal

$ ls -lt journal/

Teaching myself to become an AI engineer, in public – the small triumphs, the things I get wrong, and the version with the mess left in. New entry whenever something breaks.

#007 2026.06.15

The first of July, not the seventh of January The tool kept turning the first of July into the seventh of January, so I printed the input expecting another hidden bug, and found the page was clean. It had simply read a day-first date the other way round, and one sentence took the eval from three to seven.

#006 2026.06.10

Three out of ten I wrote the answer key by hand, then ran the tool against it. Three out of ten correct. Most of what it got wrong looked perfectly fine, which is the whole problem.

#005 2026.06.05

The bug I couldn't see by looking The tool kept returning the wrong date. I assumed it was being stupid. Turned out it was reading something I couldn't see on the page.

#004 2026.06.04

Deciding what to actually build Choosing the build: a flyer builder for the venue, why I picked it, building it in Node and Apps Script to compare, and why a finished-looking first version didn't convince me this time.

#003 2026.06.03

I did the course I'd have told you to skip My first certificate, Anthropic's AI Fluency course, and why someone who learns by building sat down and did the theory anyway.

#002 2026.05.30

How I'm actually going to do this How I'm actually going to teach myself this: start from the job, learn by building a ladder of small tools, and let the tutor make it harder, not easier.

#001 2026.05.26

Notes on becoming an AI engineer the hard way Why I'm doing this, how a marketer ended up building tools, and the honest rules of the whole project.

// designed & coded by Sonya Birch© 2026