🎨 The AI Creative · I make art.

You already make the work.
What you want is the studio around it.

So take a seat in all of it. The AI Creative — Recordings is $250 a month for every class on this path, live — the studio day where you write a playable story before you go home, the money week, the campaign build — plus their recordings and the written curriculum behind them. Come as often as they run. Month to month, cancel any time. You work at a bench, in a room with other people, and you never open a terminal.

41 things you can do after the five on this path — publish a story people play, price your own work, keep a voice that stays yours

3 classes on this path already sitting on the calendar — one pass covers every one

29 benches, catalogues and decks you keep — 3 walk you through a step at a time

91 exercises you do with your hands, not ones you watch

Work out how long your thing takes ↓

Before you start anything

How long will this actually take you?

Most unfinished work stopped because nobody ever counted the hours in it. Pick the shape of what you want to make, say how many hours a week you really have, and read the answer. Every assumption in it is yours to change.

The scope bench

Pick the shape, put your hours in. Week 0 runs the same arithmetic all the way out — past the hours, into what you charge and what you can afford to make next.

Hours a week you have

hrs/wk

Words it runs to

words

Your drafting pace

w/hr

Revision, share of drafting

Structure and publishing

hrs

A branching story at 12,000 words, drafted at 450 words an hour, is about 53 hours of work. At 6 hours a week you have a running skeleton you can play end to end in 2.6 weeks, and the whole thing finished in 8.8.

53 hours of work, all in

2.6 weeks to a running skeleton you can play end to end

8.8 weeks to finished, at your pace

4.1 hours a week to have it done in three months

The first weeks are the ones that decide it. Getting to something playable early is what tells you whether the idea works while there is still time to change it. That skeleton is what the studio day is for — you build it in a room, in a day, with people who will play it back to you.

Two of the benches you get do the money version of this sum: a pricing bench that works an offering backwards from its floor, and a budget that starts from the three numbers your life costs. Both are step-by-step, and both are on this path. The day you sit down and build the skeleton is on the calendar below.

The room you are buying

3 dates are already on the calendar.

Every recording and the written curriculum for this path. Anything you finish stays yours. Here is what that looks like on a calendar. You are already in the room, so you go — and one Saturday you come home able to do a thing you had not planned on being able to do.

August 2026

29 Sat

The Interactive Fiction Intensive 10:00 am Pacific · next up

September 2026

11 Fri

Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI 10:00 am Pacific

19 Sat

Practical Propaganda 10:00 am Pacific

Make & Do runs Mon-Thu at 9:00 Pacific in between, so the weeks with nothing on the calendar still have a room in them. The recordings come with the pass, so the 22.4 hours of Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI open the day you join, before you have been to anything at all.

Join us $250/month

What you take, in order

Five classes. Each one stands on the last.

You learn to work a model before you build anything with one. You build a structure before you try to move anybody with it. And you price the work before you decide what the work is, so the idea you commit to is one you can afford to finish. Beside each class is when the next one sits down, and what you can do at the end of it.

Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI

Next
session 11 September Friday · 10:00 am Pacific

Where the path starts, because everything after it assumes you can get a model to do what you actually meant. It is also the class that teaches you to read a passage for the devices it is using on you — the same skill, pointed the other way. Runs under the cohort name “Creative Automation”.

You leave with a system prompt you reuse, a rubric a model can apply to your own drafts, and 22.4 hours of recordings to go back to.

produce a reusable system prompt
generalise a reasoning prompt pattern
elicit output from a model
segment text into tokens and cost it
parameterise an agent persona

+ 12 more in this class

The Interactive Fiction Intensive

Next
session 29 August Saturday · 10:00 am Pacific

A studio day. You come in with an idea and leave with something a stranger can play, plus the structural vocabulary the composer further down this page is built out of.

You leave with a playable branching story, published where people can find it.

produce a playable story from a running skeleton
operate state so a branching story neither explodes nor rails
transform a linear story into chained diamonds
classify where ai can fill a shape and where it must not choose one
publish a story to a public shelf and get it played

+ 7 more in this class

Practical Propaganda

Next
session 19 September Saturday · 10:00 am Pacific

Naming an audience and the one thing you want it to do. Writing something that survives a hostile reading. Watching a claim bend as it gets retold, and finding out whether what you made changed what anybody actually did.

You leave with a campaign you can defend under hostile reading, and a way to tell whether it worked.

name an audience and its success criterion
design a channel that reaches people who are not looking for you
characterise how a claim degrades as it is retold
produce an explanation that survives a hostile reading
measure whether an explanation changed what people did

Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)

The money week, and it comes before the idea. You work out what your life costs, what your hours are actually worth, and where the floor under your price is — then you go and have ideas that clear it.

You leave with three numbers your life costs, an hourly rate you can justify out loud, and an offering built backwards from its floor.

produce the three numbers your life costs
transform naive hours into billable capacity
operate a boundary on unpaid work
parameterise an offering backwards from its floor
classify which of your offerings can reach thrive not just survive

+ 2 more in this class

Founding Federation: Build With Your Heart First

A cohort: a standing room, the people in it, and a first-touch sequence you run on a schedule instead of when you feel brave. Artists come straight here, because for you the creative work is the business.

You leave with an outbound sequence you are actually running, and a budget for work whose timeline you have now watched with your own eyes.

produce a budget for work whose timeline you have observed
execute a first touch outbound sequence on schedule

What you get, and keep

A bench, not a playlist.

29 pieces of apparatus come with this path. Here is what each of them is for.

For the story

Seven pieces of apparatus for the studio day

A companion that runs the day with you, prompt by prompt
A workbook you fill in as the story takes shape
A catalogue of story shapes to pull from
A composition guide for putting those shapes together
A structure atlas for when you want to steal a shape that already works
An authoring toolkit for writing with a model without losing your own voice
A reflection journal, for after — the part most people skip

For the audience

A guided campaign builder, and 16 decks

The campaign builder is one of the 3 fully guided apps here: it takes you from “who is this for” to a first touch you can actually send, one screen at a time.

16 decks on framing, platform ecosystems, persona stacks and how a claim travels — 8 of them written in Spanish
A security primer for people whose work makes them visible

For the money

Two guided benches and 91 exercises

A pricing bench that builds an offering backwards from its floor and holds the line when a buyer pushes back
A social budget that starts from the three numbers your life costs
91 exercises across the five classes — 34 of them in the money week alone

For the weeks in between

Rooms with people in them

Make & Do — Mon-Thu, 9:00 Pacific. You show up with the thing you are stuck on and leave having moved it.
Live hours in every class, with the person teaching it in the room with you
Every one of them again, the next time it runs — come back to the studio day you liked as many times as the pass is open
22.4 recorded hours of Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI to rewatch at 2am when a draft will not behave, and every recording after them

The idea the intensive is built on

Stories are made of five shapes.

Branch, gate, loop, braid, hub. Every interactive story you have played is those five composed in some order. Assemble one below and watch the arithmetic: passages you have to write against playthroughs you get back, and the moment where you stop tracking paths and start tracking what your reader has already done.

The story-shape composer

Click a shape to add it to the end of the structure. Click a piece in the strip to remove it. Stack up to eight — further than any first story goes — and watch what each one buys you.

Start, then a two-way branch that reconverges, a gate on a decision you recorded earlier and a loop you may re-enter up to three times, then the end.

11passages you have to write

16distinct playthroughs it yields

2state variables you have to track

1.5playthroughs per passage written

Every shape here is on the syllabus of The Interactive Fiction Intensive, along with the two capabilities this is really about — transform a linear story into chained diamonds and operate state so a branching story neither explodes nor rails. The shape catalogue and the composition guide come with the day.

Rule yourself out

Two people should close this page.

If what you actually enjoy is building the tool — the pipeline, the agent, the thing that generates — rather than making the work it generates, take the path that goes all the way into the machinery instead.

→ The AI Builder

If the point is to change how a lot of people think, and the art is mostly the delivery mechanism, take the path that is honest about that — it goes further into distribution and reach than this one does.

→ The Weird Internet Wizard

This path is for the person who wants the work to be theirs at the end of it — your voice, your structure, your price — with the model doing the parts that were never the point.

Come and make something on a Saturday.

The next studio day is The Interactive Fiction Intensive, Saturday 29 August. The room that carries the weeks in between is Make & Do, Mon-Thu at 9:00 Pacific. The rest of the dates are further up this page, and one pass gets you into all of them. You leave with work, not notes: a playable story on a public shelf, a campaign you can defend under hostile reading, and a price you can say out loud.

Join us $250/month Or just one class

The AI Creative — Recordings — $250 a month. 55 hours of material on this path by our own measure — 22.4 recorded, 91 exercises, and the live hours in every class.

You already make the work.What you want is the studio around it.