Hey friends!
Today, I have three things to share with you.
One is purely administrative (but I'm really excited about it!), one covers the poll results, and the last one is about the new Substack course we're launching NEXT WEEK.
Let's go in order.
The Neural Maze has a new address
From today, this publication lives at theneuralmaze.com.
Nothing changes for you or your subscription, since every old link will keep working automatically. But just wanted to tell you that the new "canonical home" is theneuralmaze.com.
One small step in of domains, yes, but one giant leap for this publication! 😂
Poll results are here!
A few weeks ago, I asked you about nine possible directions for The Neural Maze. A lot of you answered, and a lot of you provided long, thoughtful feedback (which I TRULY appreciate).
Here is what came back:
When you look at the poll results, one thing is clear. Well, to be more precise, three things:
Reference architecture library
The System Design Sessions (which contains both the live office hours + the monthly design challenge)
A fundamentals track
Honestly, this is exactly the top 3 I had pictured when I launched this survey, I swear! I knew these three topics would be up there, though I wasn't sure about the order 😂
So, now that I'm clear on what you want, we'll get to work.
Now, two additional comments. One about the Zoom topic, and another one about the fundamentals track.
About Zoom, this result really surprised:
Only 12% of you showed urgency on moving to Zoom
Several of you told me the actual problem in the comments. Basically, that you cannot attend live (because of timezones), and what you want is a better way to navigate through the recordings and jump to the part that matters to you.
Honestly, I believe Zoom will provide advantages, both on terms of navigation AND being able to share transcripts and the live chat. We'll keep you updated about the final decision!
The fundamentals track was a very divisive topic. It scored pretty high on urgency, but it also had a high rejection rate. One reader put it better than I could:
There are already a thousand Coursera-style fundamentals courses out there
That's a fair point, but my idea is not another Deeplearning.ai-style course. I'm thinking of a series of recorded videos that walk you through the fundamentals of system design, AI concepts, etc., building up incrementally.
By the end of each track, you'll have built a production system and understood every piece of it.
These tracks won't have the complexity of the projects we share here in the newsletter. But they will still be the best path from zero to a fully functional AI Engineer.
Or put another way: they'll give you the vocabulary to follow along without feeling lost when we start talking about webhooks, prefill and decode, KV caches, or Kubernetes.
The fundamental track has the goal of helping the people who jump into this newsletter and feel overwhelmed. And it'll be the best path from beginner to fully functional AI Engineer.
From there, it's your call …
If you want to become a Gigachad AI Engineer, you take everything you've learned from the fundamentals tracks and apply it to our Substack courses and future cohorts.
If you don't, you'll still walk away with the precise knowledge to land your first job, validated from people who have been in this field more than 10 years.
That's the idea.
And talking about courses …
A new course starts next Wednesday
We are building a Substack Brain!
Every newsletter you love, every publication you follow, every deep dive you bookmarked (but never read), every LLM Inference guide you have been meaning to go through. Everything. Everything stored as a collection of sparse vectors, dense vectors and graph entities / relations.
This is NOT a chatbot over a pile of PDFs, it's living knowledge base, that updates whenever your favorite writers post a new article. Oh, and connected to your agent harness, that's the best part! You could ask Codex, Cursor, or Claude Code about our latest article on LLM Inference. Or how our LLM inference article relates to any other article from any of your favorite newsletters (the power of graphs!).
But let's face it, mixing harness engineering and graph engineering is cool. But you know our philosophy here, at The Neural Maze. We want to build production-ready systems, not demos.
And that's why, for this project, we've been working with Inngest, a platform that lets you build reliable, event-driven background jobs, multi-step workflows, and AI agent logic directly inside your codebase. JUST WHAT WE NEEDED FOR THIS PROJECT!
The first article lands next Wednesday, straight to your inbox …
Let's build!