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Hear from our students.

I can’t speak highly enough about this course. As a technical cofounder who has attempted to keep my skills sharp, I have generally kept up with the progress of LLMs but have also had trouble parsing the good information from the hype. Before the course, I had a basic understanding but did not quite see where the true value of the technology beyond a “better google” or “content generator”. I’m now excited about the tangible benefits I see from it not only in assisting my day-to-day workload, but also in how I can integrate it into future projects. As a bonus, Vasili, provided a wonderful framework for improving my learning skills. This wasn’t just a benefit to getting more out of the course, but to improve recall and retention in general. The last thing I would highly recommend is truly devoting time to the course. With the learning methodology, lectures and materials, you want to give yourself the time to truly absorb and explore to get the most out of the course.

Andy Norborg

Founder, RealCrowd (YC S13)

LLM Fundamentals

Half my team has done this now and I’m going to make it mandatory for non-technical folks as it’s elevated our product and technical convos. Strong recommend.

Juan Andrade

Founder, Caribou (YC W19)

Vibe Coding Foundations

Just wrapping up the cohort. Loving it! Recommended to our 7,000 person company. I had been playing around with vibe coding before the course & hitting a wall at certain points. The course has enabled me to take a step back & understand what is going on under the hood to help me work with the tools better. I also now have a much better understanding of the end to end stack - which helps me figure out which pieces to put together when building. Highly recommend 🙂

Jenna Brown

WiseTech Global, Exited Founder (YC17)

LLM Fundamentals

Full recommend here for Vasili Shynkarenka’s course! As a non-technical person, I was looking for a way to unlock my brain to learn how to use these tools and also at a higher level how to even think about what they really are. Vasili used the analogy of installing some new software in my noggin to figure out how to work with this hardware. I’ve learned a ton already, am working on a pretty exciting side project as part of the program and will continue to implement some of the learning techniques in my life even outside of this subject. Really great course and I think well worth the price of admission if you're looking to level up your understanding and learn some practical skills in the space! Also great to see a few fellow S13 founders on the zooms!

Adam Hooper

Co-founder & CEO of RealCrowd (YC S13), ex-VP at a $7B private equity firm

LLM Fundamentals

I am part of Vasili’s latest cohort and it’s been amazing — and it does indeed have good vibes. I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to deeply understand LLMs and accelerate their implementation in their own professional context.

João de Paula

Mesmer (YC X25)

LLM Fundamentals

As a generalist founder, I've been wanting to develop the capacity to autonomously build software and collaborate with my technical team at Cuanto. I incrementally learned some tech skills (HTML/CSS, SQL, bash, etc.) as time allowed. I joined the first cohort of the Building with LLMs course (ie Vibe Coding Foundations!) at AI Study Camp and I feel I obtained a new superpower in just 5 weeks: I can build software. I'm obviously starting on this journey and have much to learn, but the curriculum put together by Vasili Shynkarenka and Nicole Garcia Fischer was absolutely fantastic. It starts with a strong overview of how LLMs work (which took me down Andrej Karpathy's amazing explanations) and continues with super practical pair-programming sprints, amazing guest presentations (Stepan Parunashvili and Thiago Monteiro's were awesome!) I also managed to reconnect with Juan Andrade (fellow YC founder and old friend) and make new ones friends to learn together! If you are looking for a qualitative step-function change rather than incremental learning, check them out!

Felipe Echandi

Co-founder & CEO at Cuanto (YCW19)

Vibe Coding Foundations

I started this program with AI anxiety and finished with AI optimism -a shipped product that real users are testing. As a consultant, I always felt the gap between what surveys measure and what people actually mean, so I built an AI research tool that gives you interview depth at survey scale. I learned the stack, got comfortable in the terminal, and built it myself. Bonus: no developer required!!

David Samudio

Experience Design, Banistmo

Vibe Coding Foundations

I entered the course expecting to learn how to prompt better in ChatGPT. I left the course understanding why good promptings matter, limitations of LLMs, how LLMs work, types of tools that revolve around LLMs, and with a couple of projects under my belt as well. I can’t believe we managed to accomplish so much in a short period of time, and although I was immensely stressed at falling behind at points, I do think a combination of being instructor led, having weekly goals, and engaging learning materials helped me stay the course. Looking forward to learning more, and seeing how my learning develops as I progress in my day-to-day.

Karyshma Gill

Finance, Caribou

Vibe Coding Foundations

Thanks so much, it was a lovely course - I learned a lot and had fun building so much stuff that I would previously have hesitated to even try.

Maulashree Shanbagh

Product Design, Caribou

Vibe Coding Foundations

I’m in the current cohort. It’s been extremely rewarding to first learn to love learning again. Also, the content has been extremely helpful and I built a couple mini apps for myself as well as just from learning the mystery of how LLMs work. One note is that this is a little bit serious time investment if you want to be successful. Definitely worthwhile investment though.

Nik Kotov

Founder, Atomized (YC S20)

LLM Fundamentals

I’m in Vasili’s current cohort and it’s been such a worthy investment for me. As a non-technical founder, this has been so helpful for me to better understand how to think about LLMs, evaluate AI solutions, and also build my own tools using LLMs. For fun, I’m building an app for my parents as a co-pilot for their RV trips so they don’t miss out on fun things to do and can fix common RV issues while on the road. I’ve also built tools for myself in my coaching practice to help streamline my work so I can focus more on my clients. Again, I’m non-technical and I didn’t believe Vasili when he said I’d be able to handle this class. It took a bit more time for me to work through the lessons (+25-50% more time), but the time was well invested. Kudos to Vasili and my classmates who have always been down to answer questions for me — it brings me back to the camaraderie during YC.

Cassie Choi

Founder at Pair Team (YC S19), nurse innovator, founder coach

LLM Fundamentals

I was part of the recent cohort (6th, spring 2025), and I can say that it was an amazing experience. @Vasili Shynkarenka is doing great job submerging his students deep into the AI — with the right balance of high-level info and technical detail. As the course is set in chronological order, you are getting to understand the roots of the technology all the way to the most recent developments. There is a lot of home work (readings and videos), but they are very carefully selected, and bring tremendous value. Also, the group discussions and guest lectures are making this whole endeavor fun and resemble YC batch days (especially the “demo day” at the end, where you have a chance to demo your pet AI project). But my favorite part of the course — is the module on the methods of learning that Vasili is starting with. He did a very thorough research on the subject, and passes this knowledge to us. Metacognition, active recall, secret of super fast typing—all these concepts come to help you not only during the course, but also outside of it. Overall, 10/10 — totally recommended for deepening the understanding of rapidly changing AI landscape.

Ilia Semenov

Founder at Cloudthread (YC S21), ex-Lyft, ex-EA

LLM Fundamentals

The structure of the course was excellent, and the presentations offered helpful perspectives. What stood out to me most was how it unlocked creativity in a way I didn’t expect. You don’t need to be deeply technical to build something meaningful — you just need to understand how to use the tools, communicate clearly and know what you want to accomplish. It’s more powerful than I initially thought. Using Claude Code, I created a Slack bot that acts as my second brain for product management. It follows me across threads, creates Linear tickets, generates PRDs, manages to-dos, sends me morning/evening/weekly summaries, and integrates with Notion and GitHub. I add to my repo every day, and every day it makes my life easier. Now, the first thing I do in the morning: I call Claude.”

Mike Sholler

Technical PM, Avida

Vibe Coding Foundations

It’s such a great course to get us dive deep into foundation models. I learned a ton and got my feet wet through building apps to understand the capabilities of LLMs and their eco systems. It’s also a great opportunity to meet fellow YC founders who are involved in LLMs. Can’t recommend it enough!

Maokai Lin

Co-founder & CTO of Smarking (YC W15), PhD in applied math

LLM Fundamentals

Thanks Vasili for running this. I got a ton out of the program even though I could only complete a fraction of the content in my limited time. Will continue working through it over the coming months. Highly recommend the program for anyone else who wants to get up to speed quickly, and is finding it hard to independently stay on top of all the recent developments.

Byron Hsu

Co-Founder & CTO of Paragon One (YC W17), built & exited two ecom companies

LLM Fundamentals

Great course! Vasili creates the perfect curriculum for learning AI from scratch, and even stresses on “how best to learn” which I really enjoy and still employ to this day! :D

Amy Liu

Co-founder of Hotpot Studios, YC S20 alum

LLM Fundamentals

Really good course; well thought out, concise, solid cohort, lots of feedback and attention, bonus instructor is a stud. 😆

Ali Jiwani

Founder @ Rally (YC S20)

LLM Fundamentals

Thanks Vasili Shynkarenka. It was a great course and the best way to understand the current state of AI in a short time. Plus it was super helpful for multiple teams in the company.

Michael Astreiko

Founder/CEO at Synder (YC S21)

LLM Fundamentals

When a technology is exploding in potential and the state of the art changes every few weeks how do you cut through the noise to learn enough to start building products? You take Vasili’s Understanding LLMs course, that’s how. I was in the second cohort and found it very valuable. The weekly check-ins and guest speakers were very helpful, however you can only learn so much from listening to other people and there comes a time when you need to get your hands dirty. The assignments were a great way for me to see everything that could be done with LLMs using prompts (a lot more than I imagined).

Peter Harrington

Co-founder & CTO at LexText AI, YC W12 alum

LLM Fundamentals

I took the most recent cohort of this course and it actually helped me build the demo we showed during our YC application :) Vasili has done an amazing job distilling the signal from the noise in the curriculum for this course. I went in not knowing anything about how AI works as a non-technical person, and came out understanding exactly how things work and what’s possible today with AI, which I noticed helps a lot with my product development and roadmap brainstorming. tldr, highly recommend it, take the course!

Nazli Danis

Co-founder & CEO, Paloma (YC S25)

LLM Fundamentals

Before the Building Products with Foundation Models course, I couldn’t believe one can go from 0 to being able to build an AI-powered product in a month. The whole setup - pace, teaching style, hands-on projects - it just worked. The course material is packed to the brim with all the AI knowledge. It is still my go-to guide, even over Google (yep, it’s that good). :)

Olena Vozna

Co-founder at Alphie, ex Head of Product @ YouTeam (YC W18)

LLM Fundamentals

I was part of the second cohort. The course was great - both helpful, comprehensive, and interesting, and Vasili Shynkarenka is a phenomenal instructor. If you consider building products or features using LLMs, or maybe you’re already doing so, I highly recommend joining this course.

Lior Grossman

Founder of Lifehack Labs, YC S20 alum

LLM Fundamentals

I have completed the course, and I must say that the curriculum is exceptionally comprehensive. The inclusion of guest speakers adds valuable insights and complements the material effectively. Moreover, I have found Vasili to be an outstanding teacher and facilitator. I highly recommend this course without any hesitation!

Vaibhav Kharat

Co-founder & CTO of Gigs Live (YC W20), ex-Amazon

LLM Fundamentals

I was part of the 3rd cohort that just finished and highly recommend it. Vasili is a talented teacher and group facilitator. My thought process about doing the course was that at the very least it would be a forcing function for me to spend the time every day that I need to, keeping up with the fast-moving developments in generative AI. It was definitely that, but also a lot more. Vasili’s videos and curriculum materials are well thought through and useful. And the group discussions were fun and motivating. Thanks, Vasili!

Kwindla Hultman Kramer

Co-founder & CEO of Daily YC W16, creators of Pipecat, top YC company

LLM Fundamentals

Absolutely blown away by the program led by Vasili Shynkarenka! His deep knowledge and practical approach made the complex world of LLMs accessible and actionable. The skills and techniques I learned have been invaluable in enhancing our product offerings. It's not just a course, but a transformative experience. A big shoutout to Vasili for his dedication and for creating such an impactful program!

Gerardo Briones

Founder & CEO of Pagaloop (YC W21)

LLM Fundamentals

I was part of the 2nd cohort. For me the syllabus was a great way to filter through all the info out there and have more structure in my learning experience. Really enjoyed the instruction from Vasili and the interactions with my classmates. Definitely worthwhile.

Luis Pellerano

Founder of Ruffo/Argovox (YC S22)

LLM Fundamentals

Vasili’s course was great and just what I needed to feel confident in this world of LLMs. He keeps you honest with check ins and teaches you to think about learning while you are learning. The small group was great and it was fun to meet and get to know others in the course.

Molly Abbott

Co-Founder & CPO @ Constructable (YC S23)

LLM Fundamentals

After my startup shut down late this summer, I was on the hunt for a self-study curriculum that would help me, a motivated non-coder with time on my hands, to get up to speed on the capabilities of LLMs and to learn the basics of building LLM apps. Vasili’s course provided exactly this and also acted as a great forcing function -- through weekly check-ins -- to go from 0 to 1 in just a few weeks. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for something similar.

Bala Raja

Cofounder/CEO of Clip Health (YC S16), PhD in bio/chem engg

LLM Fundamentals

Great course! I learned a lot and got to connect with some other great engineers. My goal was to fill in gaps in my knowledge with LLMs and ensure I had a good knowledge foundation to continue building on. This course helped me achieve this. Vasili clearly has a passion for teaching -- it was great working with him!

John Yoder

Co-Founder & CTO @ Constructable (YC S23)

LLM Fundamentals

I just finished the most recent cohort and can’t recommend it enough. I am non-technical and wanted to figure out LLMs and how I could employ AI in my day to day existence. Mission accomplished. I wound up writing a focus assistant in Replit that seems to work pretty well to help me take large unstructured problems and create concrete actions. I also appreciated his approach to learning in general and have found it helpful in several facets of my life. I feel much more comfortable with what AI can and can’t do now and how to position myself for the future.

Patrick Deem

Co-Founder and CFO of Voodoo Manufacturing (YC W17)

LLM Fundamentals