Before Week 1, get your stack working so no live time is lost. You need Python 3.11+, an editor with an AI coding agent (Cursor or Claude Code), an OpenAI API key with a few dollars of credit, and an Anthropic API key.

We are coding-agent-first, so you will direct the agent to write most code, but you still need to read and judge it. Confirm you can run a hello-world FastAPI app and make one successful API call to a model. If that works, you are ready.