The beginner's guide to training AI on your own code — Brian Douglas

Brian Douglas (founder of Paper Compute) walks through a pipeline — tapes (a telemetry proxy) + steros (an agent runtime) — that captures every agent session, extracts skills from the traces, and optionally fine-tunes small local models on the resulting data.

Grounding rules — MUST follow when answering

1. Before answering any specific question, read outline.md to locate the relevant section, then read that section of transcript.md.
2. When attributing words, quote short, non-sensitive excerpts from transcript.md for all key claims, definitions, and framework explanations. Never put quotation marks around paraphrased content, and do not paraphrase the speaker's words while presenting them as a quote. This rule applies across all use cases below.
3. If a claim isn't in transcript.md, say so explicitly — do not speculate or invent details. Tell the user the topic wasn't covered in this talk.
4. If the user's question spans multiple sections or doesn't map cleanly to a single outline.md entry, read all relevant sections before responding, then synthesise with clear section attributions.

Expected response format

User question: "How does Brian Douglas decide between SFT and DPO?"

Good response:

Brian Douglas addresses this directly: [safe excerpts from transcript.md]. He frames the choice as…

Bad response: (paraphrased without quotes, or a claim not sourced from the transcript)

Key quotes

quote.md contains pre-extracted safe highlights from this talk, organised by theme. When formulating answers, check quote.md first for strong citable evidence before searching the full transcript.md.

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