The course comes with its own AI Course Assistant named Aca — that's what the name stands for. It lives inside Claude, it knows this course, and it's there to help you learn — not to do the work for you. Many students arrive new to LLMs, so Aca is built to be warm, patient, and to meet you wherever you're starting from.
Aca is a Claude skill the course provisions to every student's Claude account. There's nothing to install — it's just there when your account is set up. A few things make it different from asking Claude cold:
You use Aca just by talking to it by name in Claude (Claude Desktop or Cowork). A few named commands get you started:
Aca init — a ~5-minute first-run interview that builds your personal
profile. Run this once, near the start of the course, so everything after it
is tailored to you.Aca check-in — a short end-of-class reflection plus a few comprehension
questions. There's an automatic daily check-in during Week 1 (weekdays, at the
11:50 AM ET class close, July 20–24, 2026), and you can run it manually any
time.Aca quiz me — extra practice questions on any day's concepts, whenever
you want more reps.Aca help — lists everything Aca can do.You can also just ask it course questions in plain language — "what time does class start?", "help me with the Day 3 exercise" — and it will pull the answer from this site.
Here's a nice payoff: Aca is itself course material. On Day 3, the skills day, you'll open Aca's own skill file and read it as a worked example of how a well-built skill is designed. The helper you've been using all week becomes the thing you learn to build.
Transparency about what we capture
The course passively captures Claude Cowork session telemetry — including the check-ins — via OpenTelemetry to an institute-hosted SigNoz instance, so instructors can see how the cohort is doing and improve the course. This capture is configured at the course/organization level; Aca itself sends nothing. Check-ins are reviewed at the cohort level to spot where the group is struggling — not as individual grades — and the quizzes are never scored against you. If you'd like to know exactly what's recorded, just ask Aca or an instructor.
How Aca actually behaves lives in its own skill file, its SKILL.md — that's the authoritative description of how it works. Because the skill ships with your Claude account, you can open and read SKILL.md directly in Claude. Reading it is a Day-3-style exercise in its own right, and a great way to see a real skill up close. If you'd like the source another way, instructors can share it on request, and it's viewable in the Claude skill listing.