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Alien Brain Trust
Secure AI Builder
Bootcamp
Beta 2 Cohort Kickoff
September 12, 2026 · Jared Little · alienbraintrust.ai
About Me
25+ years building systems
that can't afford to break
Jared Little.
Two and a half decades in enterprise cybersecurity and identity & access management at a large financial institution — the kind of environment where mistakes are expensive and shortcuts get audited. I'm not an academic or an AI influencer. I've built, secured, and automated complex systems at enterprise scale, and now I'm doing it again with AI — in public, with you.
About My Company
Alien Brain Trust
Advanced intelligence for intelligent businesses.
ABT runs on its own methodology — built in public, 140+ blog posts documenting the real journey. The proof is the product. We're also seeding a community-built agent registry: 4 live reference agents so far, growing as this cohort and future ones build and share their own.
My Why
I want to be the person who trained and equipped the next wave of builders
AI is going to create an enormous number of new builders and new companies. I want to be known as the person who trained, equipped, and helped build them — not from the sidelines, but hands-on, in the work.
How I Got Here
I didn't plan this.
I fell into it.
Early Days
Playing with ChatGPT like everyone else — curious, not serious yet.
The Grok Moment
My first paid AI subscription, right after Elon announced Grok. My first thought: "an MBA in your pocket." That's when it clicked — I had to actually learn this.
Building My Own Lab
Stood up alienbraintrust.ai as my own personal learning lab. I was worried a large financial institution wouldn't roll out AI capabilities fast enough, and I wanted to learn it my own way — my own guardrails, limited constraints, real but manageable token and subscription costs. A safe place to explore.
Falling In Love With It
I found myself 8-20x more productive. I replicated my own engineering team's workflows. I integrated the same kinds of tools I use at work — just running my own company with them.
What I've Built With It
Not theory. Shipped.
All of this, while working a full-time job — 10-15 hours a week.
Rebuilt and auto-deployed my own website
Shipped features in a single prompt — dark mode, blog, landing pages, research papers
Built skills and agents that handle repetitive work and keep brand and content consistent without me doing it by hand
Learned to build and deploy real agents — course tester, QA bot, social media agent, agent risk evaluator — running in isolated AWS sandboxes
Used AI to build this course itself, and to document the whole journey on the blog
AI is a level setter. It's the intelligence equalizer.
— Jared Little
Where Beta 1 Left Off
You're here because Beta 1 worked
Beta 1 shipped real builds, real feedback, and a live Demo Day. Beta 2 is the same bet, refined — a tighter two-week schedule, an improved starter kit, and the first real test of the dev container. Everything you're about to go through has already been through one real cohort.
What Makes This Different
Not another AI course
Small by design — capped at 15, not a MOOC
Community-driven — you build alongside peers, not alone
Security-focused — nobody else teaches this credibly at this depth
Hands-on — you build a real agent, then we attack it
Built for anyone — no coding background required to start
Focused on AI-first companies, AI enablement, and responsible AI transformation — not just tool tips
Why Not Just Go Free?
The free courses are real.
So is the trap.
Some of the best AI training out there is free, straight from the vendor — Anthropic, Microsoft, and others put out genuinely good material. That's not a knock on them. But you can easily get lost in it, and it's a lot of theory with no one checking whether you actually built anything.
Free vendor courses
Deep, self-paced, theory-heavy. No cohort, no accountability, no one to unstick you. Easy to start, easy to stall out.
This cohort
A community. You build hands-on, alongside peers, and come out having actually harnessed an AI-assisted workforce — not just read about one.
While You're Building, So Am I
What I'm shipping during this cohort
Beta 2 isn't just you testing the course — I'm actively building alongside it, in the open, in the same repo.
Expanding the starter kit — new agent patterns and templates as I build and validate them myself
Re-cutting every starter kit copy to strip out ABT-specific config before it ships — you should never find my keys, account IDs, or internal settings in your workspace
Finishing and publishing the last videos of the free AI-1001 intro course into the community
Pushing the "easy start" dev container toward release — skip local install entirely and connect straight into a working environment. Still in testing, not fully released yet
Breaking this course out into three standalone tracks — AI-2001 Poweruser, AI-2002 Security, AI-2003 Business Builder — each full of its own modules and lessons, with Security carrying the deepest content of the three
Your Job This Cohort
You're not just a student.
You're a tester.
This cohort is free because I need real feedback before this becomes a paid product in October.
Tell me where you get stuck — setup friction, confusing instructions, broken links
Flag anything that feels unclear, too slow, or too easy for where you're at
Actually build something and show up to Demo Day — a real build is the best feedback you can give me
Post questions and feedback in the community as you go, not just at the end
If a few of you get early access to the dev container, that feedback is gold — tell me immediately, good or bad
The Schedule
5 live sessions.
Two weeks.
Sat Sep 12 · 9:00 AM ET
Kickoff — today.
Wed Sep 16 · 9:00 PM ET
Week 1 Topic + Q&A
Sat Sep 19 · 9:00 AM ET
Build Session
Wed Sep 23 · 9:00 PM ET
Week 2 Topic + Q&A
Sat Sep 26 · 9:00 AM ET
Show & Tell / Demo Day
All course content is available from day one — the live sessions are the rhythm, not a gate. Plan for roughly 5–7 hours a week, heaviest in Week 1.
Let's Go Build
Time to look at the real thing
Tour of the website, the community, and the course, then we'll review the first three modules together, live.
What's Next
You're already in.
Here's how to go deeper.
Everyone here tonight — students and anyone just exploring — already has free-level community access. No pressure to build anything.
Just exploring
Set up your community profile, click through the content on your own time. Come back for Show & Tells whenever something pulls you in.
Ready to build
You're in Beta 2 — next live session Wed Sep 16, through Demo Day Sat Sep 26.
Missed Beta 2 or want to go deeper after? Founding Cycle opens Oct 10, 2026 — the first paid membership cycle, same community.
Join the community (free option): community.alienbraintrust.ai/plan-subscription