AI Engineering Basics — Cromus Academy
AI Engineering Basics is the first Cromus Academy track — six fully public lessons that build the vocabulary of AI engineering from zero. No account is needed for any lesson; a free account is only required to claim the certificate.
Lesson 1 covers models, tokens, and context windows, with a live comparison tool backed by the Cromus verified model registry. Lesson 2 turns token prices into cost per run and monthly cost, with an interactive cost-mode demo. Lesson 3 explains agents, harnesses, and tools. Lesson 4 covers context engineering and why structure beats prose, with a readability pre-check tool. Lesson 5 covers evals, determinism, and why grading must be reproducible. Lesson 6 introduces MCP, the Model Context Protocol, including a real connect snippet for the Cromus MCP server.
Every checkpoint is graded server-side with unlimited attempts, all scoring is deterministic with zero LLM calls, and anonymous progress is stored locally then merged into an account on signup. Each lesson ends with a "Cromus Lens" section connecting the general concept to how Cromus applies it.