FIG · How to learn from the notebooks
You can read about it for months and still build nothing.
The gap between recognizing an idea and being able to reconstruct it from nothing is the whole skill. Every chapter ends in one notebook that closes that gap, because you build the chapter with your own hands. Here is exactly how to use them.
FIG · The walkthrough
About nine minutes, worked through the transformers notebook.
FIG · The method
Five moves
Predict before you run
Each notebook opens with a few prediction prompts, answers folded one click away. Committing to a wrong answer is what makes the correction land.
Attempt before you peek
Every exercise is a stub with a spec and numbered TODOs. The full solution sits folded underneath. Try it yourself first, then open it whenever it helps.
Read the failing check
Run a cell to grade yourself: a green ok, a dash for not-attempted, or a FAIL whose message names the likely mistake and the fix. A red fail is the next hint.
Lost? Run all, then rebuild
The notebook runs top to bottom on first open, before you type anything. Watch the finished model train, then scroll back and rebuild it piece by piece.
Always finish the capstone
One open project: do the whole thing again, at full scale, your way, against a rubric you grade yourself. That final unaided build is the part that transfers.
FIG · What every notebook contains
- Self-checks
- every exercise grades itself in-cell, against a property, never a stored answer key
- Hint ladders
- conceptual, then the exact line, then symptom-keyed help; open only what you need
- Deliberate failures
- the best cells are broken on purpose, experienced then fixed; the bug is the lesson
- One growing artifact
- a head becomes attention becomes a block becomes the model you train
- A safety lens
- right beside the working code: how the same thing fails, or quietly lies, when data shifts
- Runs on free CPU
- most finish in a few minutes on Colab or local Jupyter; the full transformer build is heavier and can take about 20 minutes on free CPU
The notebook is at the bottom of every chapter. Run it once to see where you are going, then go back to the top and start filling in the blanks.