You can have a working AI machine by Sunday
Track one is free in full — an hour of work, six lessons, and at the end of it your computer is yours: the model runs on it, the tools are installed, and you can talk to it.
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There is a free course and it starts on a bare machine. Here is what you get, how long it takes, and what you will be able to do at the end of it.
What this is
Track 01 — Your Machine. Six lessons, about an hour and a half of work, and it is free in full. No account, no card, no trial that expires. Open it, do it, close the tab.
https://learn.zerwiz.org/tracks/your-machine
What you will be able to do on Sunday
Not "understand AI infrastructure". Four things you can do on your own hardware, with nothing cloud and nobody else's credit card:
- Run an AI model on your own machine. Locally, on your GPU, where it costs you nothing per prompt and nobody sees what you typed.
- Set it up from a bare machine. If you have never installed an operating system, you will have done one by the end of this.
- Talk to it. Push-to-talk in, spoken answers out. Your machine listens and it answers.
- Know where your work lives. Git, branches, and the one rule that stops you losing an afternoon's work to a bad commit.
That is the whole offer of the first track. Everything after it is a deeper path, and none of it is required to begin.
How the six lessons run
| Lesson | Time | What you do | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Know your hardware | 20 min | find out whether you can do this at all — GPU, RAM, free disk |
| 2 | Write the USB | 25 min | download, verify, and write the image. One line in there erases a disk if you get it wrong, so we tell you which line |
| 3 | BIOS, then the wizard | 30 min | Secure Boot and TPM off, boot order, the encryption prompt |
| 4 | The terminal without fear | 25 min | six commands that carry you the whole course |
| 5 | Git, GitHub, and never breaking main again | 35 min | your first repo, your first branch, your first push |
| 6 | Your AI coding tools | 30 min | the coding agent, the editor, the tools — installed, working |
Roughly three hours of work, spread over as many evenings as you like. Every lesson ends with a TRY: one thing you do yourself, on your own machine, tonight.
Who it is for
Somebody who has never installed an operating system and does not want to be talked down to. The lessons assume nothing, and they say when something is hard instead of pretending it is easy. The hardest page in the course is the one that tells you the line that can erase a disk — and that is exactly why it is there.
It is not for you if you already have a machine set up. Track 01 would be a wasted evening. Start at track 03 — Your Coding Desk — and come back here when something breaks that you cannot Google.
What it costs, and what it does not
| Track 01 | free, in full, forever. No account needed |
| Every other track | the first lesson is free to read |
| The community — live cohort, the room, all of it | $49 per person, per month |
| Hands-on help on your own project | quoted per project, separately |
Nothing on LearnAI is paywalled. That is not a marketing line, it is the design. The free courses are the top of the funnel and the reason anybody arrives; the paid rung is the room around them. If we ever put a lock on a lesson here, we have broken the promise this site is built on.
Where to go next
Three doors, and they are three different things:
- The free courses — learn.zerwiz.org. Track 01 free in full, one free lesson in every other track, nothing behind a login.
- The room — the Discord. Where the people are every day, and where the live sessions happen. Free.
- The forum —
community.zerwiz.org, opening soon. The writing that is still worth finding next year, because Discord's words are walled and this is not.
And one last thing. This post is on a site that used to say "1,284 builds shipped" on its own homepage, when nobody had ever counted anything. We deleted every one of those numbers, and we wrote about why. We are telling you that on purpose: every number on this site is one we can count, and if you ever find one that is not, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.
Start
Track 01 — Your Machine. Free, in full, about three hours of work.