Study

Cherry-pick the classical search lectures (beam search, A*, best-first) — nothing else on the ladder covers them. Watch the CoT / self-refine / reasoning lectures AFTER the matching Raschka chapters, as retrieval practice rather than first intake.

The natural feeder for the-machine once rung 5 is live. Not a substitute for the rung, and not startable ahead of it without inverting the ladder.

Read as a primer before rung 5 opens. Cheapest possible entry to the harness vocabulary; not a unit.

The one item here worth acting on immediately, and NOT as a unit — as the retrieval half of reasoning-from-scratch, which is the only open, ungated, environment-verified unit on the ladder. It rides inside that existing quota and costs no new slot. Same rule as neubig-lm-inference: the matching Raschka chapter runs on the laptop FIRST, the lecture is watched after. Reversed, it yields a vocabulary that cannot be defended — the exact failure the seat test exists to catch.

File as a primer, and use it to force a decision rather than to answer one. The agentic-ai unit currently carries NO source url and no lecture count, while docs/context/study-plan.md attributes rung 5 to Roitman — so rung 5 has one slot and more than one candidate meaning. Standing recommendation (Connor, 2026-08-18): Roitman remains the rung; this is landscape reading, watchable at any point. On the teaching ladder it is L1/L2 and earns a `read it` seat unless the AgentX project is actually entered.

The heaviest item on the list and the only one with a HARD published prerequisite Connor does not meet on the record: CS189/CS289 or equivalent, plus assumed working ability to train deep neural networks. CS336 (rung 4) is what clears that — and CS336 sits behind rung 3, which sits behind rung 2 at 0/32, so this is a genuine three-rung dependency. Recorded here with the prerequisite stated so it stops being rediscovered as "should I start this yet?" every few months. If only one slice is ever wanted, it is the LLM RL lecture pair + HW4; lectures 1–3 (imitation, behavioural cloning) are the approachable on-ramp.

UNWATCHED — title and channel confirmed via oEmbed, but the video itself has not been opened, so no earned overlap read exists. On its stated syllabus it is rung-4 material sitting directly on CS336 Unit 2, and it is the clean complement to gpu-kernels: that bridge is INTRA-GPU (occupancy, coalescing, tensor cores), this is INTER-GPU (process groups, collectives, device meshes, and pipeline/data/FSDP/tensor/context/expert parallelism composed into one framework). Neither covers the other. Its rare shape is the draw — one self-contained build with a working artifact at the end, where everything else at rung 4 is a 19-lecture course. The catch: "no prior knowledge of distributed training required" is true of the distributed part only; it also builds MLA, RoPE, YaRN and a mixture-of-experts layer, so without transformer fluency it is watched rather than built — a `read it` seat in a `ran it` costume. Revisit when CS336 opens, or earlier if the transformer fluency arrives ahead of the ladder.

UNVERIFIED — the code has not been opened, so no overlap read exists. Read the code before it is judged. Listed so the gap is on the record rather than rediscovered monthly.