Dev at Alpha School • Graduate Gauntlet AI W25
Austin, TX
Joined June 2018
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Gauntlet Cohort 2 Launches Monday
Everyone Keeps Asking Me the Same 2 Questions
Should I Join?
Absolutely. Best Experience of my Life.
How Do I Prepare?
I'm Dropping Everything I Learned From 1,000+ Hours of Coding into One Crash Course👇
Reece Harding retweeted
a good reminder that just because someone states their opinion with intense conviction, does not make it fact. they can come back a year later and state the absolute opposite view with the same conviction.
35:31
shout out @teachthemx3
The new Huberman Lab episode is out: How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt
0:00 Joe Liemandt
3:16 History of Traditional Classroom Model; Education Milestones
8:08 Sponsors: David & Lingo
10:25 Alpha School, High Standards & Support
22:33 Effective Support, Academics vs Athletics; Homeschooling
30:03 AI, Individualized Learning & Mastery
34:31 Teacher Education, Standardized Tests, Role of School
40:52 Sponsors: AG1 & Helix Sleep
43:42 AI, Scaffolding Learning, Mastery; Working Memory & Fluency
52:41 Working Memory, Focus; Gifted Kids
1:00:30 Basics Mastery, Grade Level Catch-Up, Individualized AI Lessons & Pace
1:06:57 Sponsor: LMNT
1:08:17 Shame, Motivation, Growth Rate; Overcoming Mental Blocks & Paying Kids
1:20:55 Suffering & Motivation, Kids Goals, Sports; Doing Hard Things
1:31:21 Founders High School, Life Skills; Kids' Goals
1:42:44 Reimagining Classroom Education
1:47:21 Importance of Building & Creating, AI & Humanity
1:58:04 Science & Redesigning Experiments, Kids' Interest-Led Projects
2:05:26 Huberman Lab Live Events
2:06:14 Learning Predictors, Gender, Income; Redesigning the School System
2:18:32 Success; Sports Academy, Alpha School Expansion
2:28:36 Acknowledgements
2:31:07 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter
Includes paid partnerships.
There’s much critique of this Naval clip
As somebody who idolizes Naval, here’s the part people are missing
Naval’s point here isn’t that you should have ZERO obligations
It’s that your obligations should be so few that you should be able to keep them in your head
As Naval would say:
“Inspiration is perishable”
You must give yourself space to dive into what inspires you in the moment
why Naval deleted his calendar, ghosts everyone, and refuses to be anywhere at a specific time
Naval: "I read a blog post by Marc Andreessen where he said don't keep a schedule. And I took that to heart. So I deleted my calendar and I don't keep a schedule. I try to remember it all in my head. If I can't remember it, I'm not going to add it."
"I have a nasty email autoresponder that says, I don't check email and don't text me either. If you need to find me, you'll find me."
"My wife knows not to ever book or schedule me for anything. I'm not expected to go to couples dinners. I'm not expected to go to birthdays. I'm not expected to go to weddings. If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up, she says he makes his own decisions. You got to ask him directly."
Chris: "Are you not killing serendipity in a way?"
Naval: "No. I'm freeing up all my time. So my entire life is serendipity. I get to interact with whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever."
The best gratitude hack I’ve found
Have used it dozens of times
If you’re lacking gratitude for something, genuinely convince yourself you don’t have it
For health:
Convince yourself you’re an 88 year old parapalegic
You can’t breathe without a respirator
You hate your life
Then you snap your fingers
And you have your current body back
You’ll feel so f*ing grateful
Shout out Alex Hormozi
Alex Hormozi explains how to operationalize gratitude.
"How do you operationalize gratitude? Imagine something terrible. And then remember that that terrible thing has not occurred. That's gratitude. People are like, oh man, I'm so grateful for my health. How do you get grateful for your health? Imagine that you have cancer and that you're about to die. And then realize that you don't have cancer."
"You're not dead. The fact that you are alive is living proof that you can endure it. The day that something kills you, you won't have to anymore. Your life every day exists as evidence that you can handle everything that has come your way."
"Find work that feels like play to you but looks like work to everybody else" - Naval
Elon Musk hasn't taken a vacation in 23 years. But that's not the part that should disturb you.
What should disturb you is that he doesn't want one.
His first wife Justine said she once booked a surprise trip to Paris for his birthday. He went. He brought three engineering textbooks. He spent the entire flight redesigning a rocket fuel injector on napkins. At dinner overlooking the Eiffel Tower he pulled out his laptop and started answering emails.
She said it was the loneliest she'd ever felt sitting across from another person.
But here's what most people miss when they judge this.
Elon isn't avoiding rest. He doesn't experience work the way most people do. His brain doesn't categorize rocket engineering as labor. It categorizes it the same way your brain categorizes your favorite hobby. He's not grinding. He's playing.
The question this should raise isn't "how does he work so much." It's "what would your life look like if your work felt like play."
Most people need vacations because they spend 50 weeks a year doing something their body is trying to escape from.
The real goal isn't more time off. It's building a life you don't need time off from.
Reece Harding retweeted
Tomorrow I'm sitting down with @nateliason, founder, writer, and the man behind @AlphaSchoolATX - a new entrepreneur high school opening in NYC this fall. Tuition is $150K a year. The promise: every student makes $1M in gross profit by graduation, or the family gets the tuition refunded.
To explain why a school like this needs to exist, Nat starts with one word borrowed from pro wrestling: kayfabe. The fake fight everyone agrees to take seriously. He thinks that's exactly what school has become for almost every kid in America.
This clip is the case.
Reece Harding retweeted
Don't have a CS degree or 3+ years of engineering exp?
BUT...
You have a ridiculous level of agency?
APPLY!
Anyone can learn to be a 10x AI Engineer, but not everyone can learn to have agency.
‼️WARNING‼️
If you like agency and ambition, then don't waste your time, because you won't make it to graduation.
I’m excited to announce something we’ve been working really hard on:
For the past little while Gauntlet AI has been exclusively for engineers with 3+ years of software engineering experience. Not a great fit for junior engineers.
But now we’ve had hiring partners see so much success with our trials of folks on the more junior end we can accept candidates with less experience—even some with no experience whatsoever.
Yes, including new CS grads (or those of you graduating this year).
We will:
* Fly you to Austin
* Train you to build with AI (and build AI systems) in super intense 100 hr weeks
* Take care of food, housing, even laundry
* Help you land a minimum $200k job as an AI engineer.
It’s completely free because hiring partners pay us recruiting fees to hire you. You pay nothing, ever, no matter what. Even if you don’t take a job after the program.
It’s taken a decade of work and building trust with our hiring partners for them to be able to commit to this, and we’re really excited to see what it brings.
Reece Harding retweeted
After 10 years of teaching in public schools, I am leaving.
Every year, I have a few students who share what a difference I have made, and that keeps me going for another year. But I am seeing an undeniable downward trend in standards and expectations. Teachers are expected to curve grades, often called restorative grading. Students who can't read are passed along out of compassion. Many teachers right now are questioning their purpose due to low standards and the lack of enforcement of basic rules and procedures.
Needless to say, my current environment is not conducive to my personal educational philosophy.
I considered starting my own microschool. I reflected on what I believe education should be: individualized learning, high expectations, meaningful life lessons, and a culture that refuses to lower standards. It is the same philosophy I had when I homeschooled my older children. A microschool was tempting. But when I laid out my vision in full, it aligned almost entirely with what @AlphaSchoolATX has already built.
I have decided to join Alpha as a guide.
To the teachers who follow this account and are still early enough in their careers to make a change: fill out the guide application. Once you spend a day on an Alpha campus, you know without a doubt that there is no other place that values students and learning more.
And if you're in Houston, come say hi at the Alpha summer camp. I am looking forward to raising the bar and supporting students while they achieve goals that others consider "impossible."
I've had a system like this for 3ish months
Highly recommend building one
You can literally just natively ingest your imessages and apple notes to start
Also strongly recommend exporting your LLM conversations from ChatGPT, Claude, etc
Lastly, strongly recommend putting in PDFs of your favorite books so the LLM can parse and cite the original works you base your decision making on rather than abstracted summaries found on the web
Happy to make a video walking through how to build this if enough people are interested
This is Farzapedia.
I had an LLM take 2,500 entries from my diary, Apple Notes, and some iMessage convos to create a personal Wikipedia for me.
It made 400 detailed articles for my friends, my startups, research areas, and even my favorite animes and their impact on me complete with backlinks.
But, this Wiki was not built for me! I built it for my agent!
The structure of the wiki files and how it's all backlinked is very easily crawlable by any agent + makes it a truly useful knowledge base.
I can spin up Claude Code on the wiki and starting at index.md (a catalog of all my articles) the agent does a really good job at drilling into the specific pages on my wiki it needs context on when I have a query.
For example, when trying to cook up a new landing page I may ask:
"I'm trying to design this landing page for a new idea I have. Please look into the images and films that inspired me recently and give me ideas for new copy and aesthetics".
In my diary I kept track of everything from: learnings, people, inspo, interesting links, images.
So the agent reads my wiki and pulls up my "Philosophy" articles from notes on a Studio Ghibli documentary, "Competitor" articles with YC companies whose landing pages I screenshotted, and pics of 1970s Beatles merch I saved years ago. And it delivers a great answer.
I built a similar system to this a year ago with RAG but it was ass.
A knowledge base that lets an agent find what it needs via a file system it actually understands just works better.
The most magical thing now is as I add new things to my wiki (articles, images of inspo, meeting notes) the system will likely update 2-3 different articles where it feels that context belongs, or, just creates a new article.
It's like this super genius librarian for your brain that's always filing stuff for your perfectly and also let's you easily query the knowledge for tasks useful to you (ex. design, product, writing, etc) and it never gets tired.
I might spend next week productizing this, if that's of interest to you DM me + tell me your usecase!
Reece Harding retweeted
🎯 "Everybody had a 4.0. They were crushing it. They loved college.
And I was like, well, what's the worst part?
They're like: lectures are a total waste of time.
Four of them had written to their school papers about, can we stop the charade that are these lectures?
200 people in class. None are paying attention.
They're all scrolling TikTok or just doing other stuff.
The teacher is terrible.
My daughter is a math & English major, and she's like, I just use @_MathAcademy_.
She always had disdain for me, like, you should go to class dad.
And once she finally went, she's like, okay, I get it.
You skip class because it's a total waste of time."
(discussed ~1:28:26)
My conversation with @jliemandt on why the future of education is better than you think.
0:00 The current education system
7:01 What makes Alpha School different
11:01 What are the results
23:20 Current classroom struggles
26:40 What does mastery mean?
35:37 Changing the education system
39:19 Teaching through AI
44:27 How do you solve motivation?
57:01 What makes a good teacher?
1:01:04 Coaching
1:05:17 What life skills matter?
1:08:18 Doing hard things
1:13:25 AI Monitoring
1:21:08 Effort vs. IQ
1:24:40 What happens after Alpha School?
1:38:21 The Genius of Jack Welch
1:45:49 Trilogy IPO: the choice to not go public
1:51:40 Physical vs. virtual learning
2:03:18 Does Paying Kids To Learn work?
2:11:01 What Is Success For You?
(Includes paid partnerships)
Reece Harding retweeted
Since September, I have been putting incredible effort into building @CrushAPexams. The Crush AP mission is to be the best tool students can use to prepare for their AP exams. We are starting with AP Physics I.
For the last six months, we have worked with a cohort of students at Alpha High School to test the product. The students are all on track to earn a 5 this May. The team is excited, and we are grateful to have been able to build this.
Building Crush AP is about creating a sustainable business. Early on, we did not want the pursuit of profit to detract from building a great product, so we didn’t focus much on selling.
More recently, we started posting more on the Crush AP X account. Last week, we even got our first paying customer.
Reflecting this weekend, we realized demand is highest now due to the impending exam date. We would regret not acting on this moment and telling the world that Crush AP is available.
So, Crush AP is now $100 for the next month, and our mission is to see how many students we can help get 5s on their AP Physics I exam. Crush AP has a few core features that will get students there.
The first core feature is targeted practice, where students can answer AP-style questions spanning all eight units. If a question is answered incorrectly, students have the opportunity to chat with an AI to understand where they went wrong.
The next core feature is drills. In the process of becoming experts in AP Physics, we realized the exam tests a series of core skills: equation identification, free-body diagram creation, proportional analysis, deriving equations, and graph creation.
For each of these skills, we created a dedicated drill mode in our application where students can ensure their gaps are covered.
In both drills and targeted practice, students have access to a tailored AI chatbot that tutors them on the problem they are working on. We worked with an AP exam specialist to fine-tune the chat experience, and it has been trained to teach the way the specialist teaches his clients.
We know 1:1 tutoring is not fully solved yet, but our in-app chat experience feels close.
Crush AP contains every question type that appears on the AP exam, from derivations to ratio reasoning to graph analysis. Using our expertise in exam specifics, we built an automated multi-agent system to generate AP exam questions, so students will never run out of practice material.
There is currently no other way to get a tailored, exam-specific training experience like this. If a student is feeling stressed about their exam in May, I would not hesitate to recommend Crush AP to help them score a 5.
I will tap into my network to find students taking the exam in May. If you are reading this and know anyone planning to take the AP Physics I exam, we would really appreciate it if you could let them know about Crush AP.
Reece Harding retweeted
Our history students spend 45 minutes a day voluntarily learning geography.
Every break, Every lunch... Same thing... GeoGuesser.
So we asked the obvious question:
Why doesn't this exist for history?
We built it.
You watch AI footage from a time and place in history.
Then you guess where and when it happened.
They love it.
Reece Harding retweeted
If you're a game designer, software engineer, Marketing specialist, or anything adjacent to those roles, and you've been affected by the @EpicGames layoff, I'd love to chat about what we're doing at @AlphaSchoolATX and @Superbuilders.
We're out to accelerate education for 1 billion kids, just like you've all brought the love of gaming to more than 1 billion lives.
My DM's are open.
Sad news for Epic Games. Hope the efforts to turn things around can work. gamesbeat.com/epic-games-lay…
Reece Harding retweeted
My proposal for Meek Mill:
I’ll fly you to Austin (private jet + 5-star everything).
My team of instructors will train you in AI personally.
We rally with the team putting AI in classrooms for thousands with Texas Sports Academy (free in Texas w vouchers).
I’m 100% serious.
Reece Harding retweeted
🚨📕 THE BOOK OF ELON IS NOW LIVE!!! 🎉🚀
This is the book we WISHED @elonmusk would write…
“All of Elon's most useful ideas, in his own words.”
Learn directly from the world’s greatest entrepreneur, like you’re sitting across from him at dinner.
It took FIVE YEARS to make this for you.
Because it's built from hundreds and hundreds of Elon's public appearances.
I went through 3,000,000+ words to collect the most useful and timeless ideas.
The final book is ~50,000 words.
Every word is USEFUL.
(This is what I do. My first book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, is one of the top 100 most highlighted books of all time on Kindle.)
Then, I spent $50,000+ on editing and design so it looks and feels beautiful.
Then…
> Foreword by @naval.
> Visuals by @jackbutcher.
> Blurb from @mrbeast.
> Published by @scribemediaco.
> And yes, approval on this idea from Elon himself, thanks to @samteller.
I went Maximum Effort to make this an all-timer.
We got 10/10 on reviews from early readers, then worked on it for ANOTHER YEAR.
Why so much effort?
My mission is to create One Million Musks.
For a generation to lift our gaze and build, so our grandchildren live in a world beyond our wildest dreams.
I’m an independent author.
I don’t get an advance.
I risk my own time and money to make these books.
Then we give away millions of them. Digital versions are free.
I believe this book can benefit every human, and if you can’t pay five bucks for it, I want to personally gift it to you.
Because I know it is useful.
Useful how?
You may be seeking purpose, a mission worthy of your life’s effort.
You may have a clear purpose and seek the tools for success.
You will find both in this book.
Get the benefits of Elon’s entire life of hard-won lessons in a five-hour, easy read.
(I checked, it’s a 5th-grade reading level.)
You’ll feel personally mentored by the greatest entrepreneur in history.
Click below to buy it now on Amazon, Audible, or directly from me.
Amazon: amzn.to/47avSuh
Audible: lnkd.in/gi_7HrFP
Me: lnkd.in/gS2xWUWH
If you’re not sure it’s worth $4.99 yet, just start reading the free version.
PLEASE take 6 seconds to Like, Bookmark, and Repost.
Even better: send this to your friends, team, or Group Chats!
I guarantee this book will improve their lives.
Spread the word!
Every little thing helps.
Your support spreads good ideas around the world, helping people and making the future better for everyone.
Thank you!
Forward. Together.
Reece Harding retweeted
The original 2014 "Pen is Mightier" paper gets quoted a lot. It was monumental for starting the conversation, but let's be honest: the setup was flawed and the dataset was small.
However, their underlying instinct was right. Here is why:
1. A Norwegian study using 256-channel HD EEGs found that handwriting triggers widespread brain connectivity in ways typing simply doesn't. It actively engages the neural pathways required for memory and deep learning.
2. In 2025, The "Keep the Hands in Mind" meta-analysis examined fine motor skills (FMS). It proved that cognitive skills are deeply tied to FMS, with graphomotor skills (handwriting) showing the strongest effect on academic success.
3. In 2024, a meta-analysis reviewing 24 separate replication studies of the original "Pen is mightier" study, researchers found that when students take and review handwritten notes, it conclusively leads to higher academic achievement than typing.
We shouldn't abandon digital tools, but we absolutely cannot afford to lose the cognitive benefits of the pen. ✍️
Reece Harding retweeted
We asked Texas Sports Academy students to describe their school:
- "This is the first year I've ever been happy after school"
- "Moved up from 6th grade to 11th grade reading"
- "2 homers and we've only played 4 games"
- "I just want to be at school all the time"
Texas Sports Academy students get 2 hours of AI-powered academics and 3 hours of elite sports training - all before the school day is over.
Hear from our students:
