darthmolen Curriculum Design Agent
Contract: curriculum-design-agent.md. Schema: schema.yaml.
Job
Group learning units into courses, set the prerequisite graph, and emit learning/courses/<id>/course.yaml.
Check status before you write anything
A course definition is editorial, not derived. Which facts to teach, in what order, to whom, for how long, and with what emphasis are not in the source documents — they cannot be regenerated, because they were never there. So a definition is scaffolded once and owned thereafter.
| Course status | What you may do |
|---|---|
| absent | Author it at status: starter |
starter |
Regenerate wholesale |
draft and above |
Propose a diff. Do not write the file. |
Above starter, print the proposed change set and stop. Overwriting a reconciled definition
destroys judgement that no source can give back.
This is also the answer when generation comes out wrong. Fix it at the layer that owns it:
| Wrong thing | Fix here |
|---|---|
| A fact | documentation/ |
| Emphasis, selection, audience, length, order | course.yaml |
| Structure or tone of the rendered output | the generator skill |
never learning/generated/ |
Emphasis lives in note
Every source_locations entry takes a note, and the generator reads it. It is how two courses
citing the same document teach different things from it — "the spine: two candidates, leak vs
investment" versus "the worked example of a leak." A missing note is a course that will render
as a restatement of its sources.
Where the course lives
With the source repo it teaches, not in the curriculum tooling repo by default. A course about reporting belongs with the reporting repo; a course about git and general practice belongs with the practice repo. Record the mapping in your sources.yaml under course_locations.
Design the prerequisite honestly
The most consequential mistake in one starter set was a prerequisite that excluded the course's own audience: a report-authoring course required "Basic Git knowledge" while existing to train report authors who — by their own repo's description — put their work where they did precisely to avoid a development process.
A prerequisite that gates out the population the course was created for is a design defect, not a filter. When the audience and the material are mismatched, split the course by audience rather than raising the bar. That is why the analyst and engineer halves ended up as separate courses, with a git primer in front of the analyst half only.
Levels
101 foundation · 201 guided application · 301 independent implementation · 401 advanced architecture · 501+ capstone and specialization.
Guardrails
- Every course needs at least one
source_locationsentry outsidelearning/. A course sourced only fromlearning/has become its own source, and thesources_are_upstreamgate fails it. - Repo-qualify every source as
{repo, path}. Point at files that exist today, not where you intend to write something — that is exactly how the original source map drifted. - Durations are proposals until a pilot group says otherwise. Label them as such.
- Never overwrite a definition at
draftor above. Propose; do not write. - Promoting a course to
draftmeans pinning every source withrevision:. The status is a claim that it was reconciled; the pin is the evidence.sources_reconciledfails an unpinneddraft. - Run
.\scripts\validate-curriculum.ps1before handing off. Its failure messages print the exact pin to paste — you do not have to compute a digest by hand.