01
Read the brief
Who needs what, by when, and why it matters to the team.
Build AI engineering skills, from your first Python to agents.
Learn AI engineering at a company that doesn't exist.
Join the fictional Code Nexus team and practise Python, cloud and AI decisions. Read the brief, try the task and explain the checked result.
The Code Nexus product map
Eight products, one team, and you're on the rota.
Feed
Live
Communities
Creator
Messages
Trends
Assist
Search
Code NexusProducts, people, and AI systems
02
Learn the one idea you need
A key idea and a worked example from the teammate who uses it at work.
03
Try the task
Use a Python workspace or a simulated terminal, Git workflow or cloud console. Check the supplied result.
04
Explain yourself
Finish with a tested change, a decision record or an incident note you can defend.
Evidence in the real world
Big companies break things too. They just write it up afterwards.
Outages, bad inputs and misleading metrics happen at every scale. Code Nexus lets you practise the same kinds of decisions where a mistake costs a retry, not a public incident report.
The Code Nexus team
Your colleagues are fictional. Their opinions are not.
Seven people and one AI assistant who will question your assumptions, read your evidence and ask what happens in production.
Maya Chen
Senior AI Engineer · Your mentor
Calm, precise and quietly dry. Starts you on checklists, then takes them away. "It runs. Now show me what happens when the input is wrong."
Kabelo Mokoena
Platform and DevOps Engineer
Linux, containers, pipelines and incident recovery. Writes his best runbooks right after something breaks. "It worked on my machine. I've updated the runbook to say why that wasn't enough."
Amara Okafor
ML and Data Engineer
Data quality, evaluation and responsible AI. Sceptical of any result that looks too good. "The accuracy improved. Which group did we leave out?"
Priya Naidoo
Cloud Architect
Azure, AWS, architecture and resilience. Warm, and suspicious of unexplained spend. "Azure will provision it. Finance will ask whether we needed it."
Lydia Roe
Security Engineer
Identity, least privilege, secrets and incident control. Deadpan about boundaries. "Nobody will guess the URL is not an access control."
Leo Martins
Product Manager
Requirements, priorities and stakeholders. Arrived asking "can we add AI?" and now brings constraints. "I brought a reason and a success measure this time."
Jax Rivera
Creator Partnerships Lead
The voice of Code Nexus's creators: user impact, accessibility and unusual tickets. "Nobody uses it that way? I have twelve screenshots."
8-BIT
Code Nexus Internal AI Assistant
A fictional internal AI assistant. Helpful, fast, and occasionally too sure of himself, which is why his work always comes with something you can verify.
8-BIT has an answer for everything. Checking it is your job.
The Code Nexus curriculum
9 seasons. 72 episodes. One slightly chaotic career arc.
You start by getting a laptop to log in. You finish by putting AI agents into production. Each season changes your role, your tools and who gets paged when it breaks.
- 018 episodes
Season 1
Welcome to Code Nexus
Your first days at Code Nexus: get your workstation working, read the evidence, and write your first Python.
The badge works. Let's see what else does.
- 029 episodes
Season 2
The Python Team
Turn one-off scripts into reliable tools: functions, data, classes and the habits that make code team-ready.
Nobody expects the IndentationError.
- 038 episodes
Season 3
Welcome to Engineering
Join the engineering team: Linux and the shell, Git and GitHub, and how work gets reviewed.
Your code has colleagues now.
- 048 episodes
Season 4
One Company, Two Clouds
Capacity, cost and responsibility on Azure and AWS, and how to choose between them.
Scales to infinity and beyond. So does the invoice.
- 059 episodes
Season 5
The AI Proposal
What AI can and cannot do: machine learning basics, responsible use, and making a case with evidence.
"Can we add AI?" is the start of the meeting, not the end.
- 068 episodes
Season 6
Build Code Nexus Assist
Build a creator-support assistant with retrieval, tools, evaluation and the safety controls to defend it.
Confidence is not a source.
- 078 episodes
Season 7
It Worked on My Laptop
Ship it: package the service in Docker, run it on Kubernetes, and keep it healthy under load.
Kabelo has heard this one before.
- 088 episodes
Season 8
You Own the Release
Own delivery end to end: pipelines, review, rollout and a capstone you can show an employer.
The deploy button is not the ending.
- 096 episodes
Season 9
Autonomous Systems & Agent Engineering
Build, evaluate, and harden autonomous multi-agent systems: loop architectures, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and production guardrails.
The agents have a plan. Check it.
Your learning route
From your first Python to AI engineering.
Start with no coding experience. The 9 seasons build practical skills mapped to 11 external exams, from your first line of Python to building and evaluating AI agents.
Stage 1 · E01–E10
Foundations and Python
Get the workstation working, write your first Python and prepare for PCEP. Book the external exam when you are ready.
PCEP
Stage 2 · E11–E24
Python, Linux and GitHub
Turn scripts into tools, live in the shell and collaborate through pull requests.
PCAPLinux EssentialsGH-900
Stage 3 · E25–E32
Cloud
Capacity, cost and shared responsibility on Azure and AWS, with evidence for choosing.
AZ-900AWS Cloud Practitioner
Stage 4 · E33–E48
AI engineering
From machine learning basics to a retrieval-backed assistant with tools, tests and guardrails.
AI-901AWS AI PractitionerAI-103
Stage 5 · E49–E56
Containers and Kubernetes
Package it in Docker, run it on Kubernetes and keep it healthy under load.
KCNA
Stage 6 · E57–E70
Release and agents
Own the release, finish the capstone and practise autonomous agent systems.
AZ-400
Exams are booked and sat with each provider, which issues the certification.
Start Season 1Certification prep, minus the cramming.
Practise skills mapped to 11 external certification exams, from PCEP to AZ-400. Season checkpoints show what needs more work. Book each exam with its provider, which issues the certification.
How we map certification objectives
PCEP-30-02
Certified Entry-Level Python Programmer
PCAP-31-03
Certified Associate in Python Programming
010-160
Linux Essentials
GH-900
GitHub Foundations
AZ-900
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
CLF-C02
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
AI-901
Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals
AIF-C01
AWS Certified AI Practitioner
AI-103
Developing AI Apps and Agents on Azure
KCNA
Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate
AZ-400
Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions
When the hints run out, a human picks up.
8-BIT lives in the story and is confident about most things. For a real question, a Code Nexus mentor reads your note, replies privately and helps you find your next step.
Get a personal reply
Tell a mentor which episode has you stuck, then keep the conversation going by message.
Meet on a progress call
Both paid plans include four 30-minute mentor calls each month, subject to availability.
A record of your work
Evidence beats a completion badge.
Anyone can click "next" forty times. Code Nexus records the decisions, fixes, reviews and handovers you actually made as the story gets harder.
Episode evidence
Complete a verified action: a technical decision, a code change, an incident response, or a structured handover.
A continuous story
Teammates, products and your earlier decisions come back. Some of them come back with questions.
Season checkpoints
Readiness checks appear inside the seasons where their subject is taught—so the milestone follows the work, not a detached syllabus.
From the blog
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Udemy Alternative for Coding: Practice Beats Video
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AI engineering
AI Engineer Skills You Need in 2026
The skills an AI engineer needs in 2026, from Python and cloud to retrieval, agents, evaluation and safety, with the order to learn them in.
4 min read · Updated
Questions before your first day?
- Is Code Nexus free?
- The first 15 episodes are free. Core programme and Certification prep include the remaining authored episodes. External exams and vouchers are separate.
- Can I learn AI engineering with no coding experience?
- Yes. Episode 1 assumes no coding background and starts with the workstation, files, accounts and safe habits you'll use throughout. Step one is getting a login to work, which is also step one of most IT jobs.
- What is an episode?
- An episode is one self-contained Code Nexus workday. You receive a brief, learn the idea the decision needs, work through interactive scenes, and leave evidence of what you did. Like a workday, except it ends when you've finished.
- How do seasons work?
- Each season moves you to a new part of Code Nexus: foundations, Python, engineering workflow, cloud, AI, Code Nexus Assist, platform delivery, release ownership, and autonomous agent engineering. The story and your evidence carry forward. Yes, your Season 3 decisions do come back.
- Does Code Nexus include certification exams?
- Season checkpoints help you review skills mapped to external exams. Book each exam separately with its provider, which issues the certification. Code Nexus completion records are separate.
Press start.