AI bootcamp for engineering teams.
“Hacking Culture Bootcamp @ Waag Society” by Sebastiaan ter Burg is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Give your engineering team the edge that disrupts your market. Two days to transform how they build.
Who This Is For
PE and VC Portfolio Companies
Accelerate value creation by upskilling your portfolio's engineering teams on AI. Measurable productivity gains within one week of the bootcamp.
CEOs and Business Leaders
Your engineers are experimenting with AI individually. This turns scattered experimentation into a coordinated capability that delivers business outcomes.
CTOs and Engineering Leaders
Give your team the structured training they need to move from curious about AI to confidently shipping with it. Peer-led by CTOs who use these tools daily.
The Early-Mover Advantage in AI Development
The organisations that move early on AI-assisted development will have a compounding advantage: smaller teams shipping faster, at higher quality, with capabilities that were impossible two years ago. The opportunity is enormous, but most companies are stuck in unstructured experimentation. Individual engineers tinkering with Copilot or ChatGPT, no shared practices, no security framework, no way to measure whether any of it is actually helping.
For PE and VC-backed businesses operating against a value creation plan, turning that experimentation into a coordinated capability is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make. An engineering team that masters AI-assisted development is effectively two to three engineers larger - permanently - without a single new hire.
Our bootcamp makes that shift in two days. Not with slides about AI strategy, but with hands-on practice using the tools that are reshaping how software gets built - on your team's own codebase, facilitated by CTOs who use these tools every day in production.
“We don't teach theory. We take your engineers from wherever they are with AI today to confidently shipping production code with it, in two days, using their own codebase.”
What Your Team Will Learn
The bootcamp covers the full spectrum of AI-assisted development, from fundamentals through to production workflows. Every module is hands-on, engineers work on real problems using real tools throughout.
AI-first development. How large language models actually work, what they are good at, and where they fail. The mindset shift from writing every line of code to directing AI and reviewing its output. This is not about replacing engineers - it is about making every engineer significantly more capable.
The tools that matter. Practical, opinionated guidance on Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and the emerging ecosystem. Not a feature comparison, a working session where your team builds with each tool and understands which to use when. By the end, they have a team standard rather than individual preferences.
Context engineering. The single biggest lever for AI-assisted development quality. How to structure project context, write specifications that AI tools can work from, and build repeatable workflows that produce consistent results. This is the difference between engineers who get mediocre AI output and engineers who get production-quality code.
Agents and automation. How to build and orchestrate AI agents that automate repetitive development tasks: from code generation to testing to documentation. Multi-agent architectures, MCP integration, and connecting AI tools to your existing systems.
Quality and security. How to review AI-generated code effectively, build quality guardrails into AI workflows, and establish a security posture that enables AI adoption without creating compliance risk. The practical framework for deploying AI tools at each security level - from basic agreements through to self-provisioned infrastructure.
Team adoption. The 30-day rollout plan your team leaves with. How to measure impact honestly, how to handle the engineers who resist change, and how to build AI-first practices into your team's daily workflow rather than running it as a separate initiative.
28 Modules. 6 Audience Tracks. Your Agenda.
Engineering Leadership
For CTOs and their direct reports. Strategic focus: AI adoption, team transformation, measuring impact, and the business case for AI investment.
General Engineering
For working engineers. Deep hands-on focus: tools, workflows, context engineering, agents, code review, and production practices.
Engineering + Product
For cross-functional teams. Covers both technical implementation and how AI changes product development - from spec writing to customer research.
The curriculum is modular, 28 self-contained modules that we assemble into a two-day agenda tailored to your team's experience level and priorities. An engineering leadership team that needs to understand AI strategy gets a different bootcamp from a team of senior engineers who want to master multi-agent orchestration.
We built this curriculum from experience, not theory. It has been refined across multiple live deliveries in London, Poole, Paris, Tallinn, and Lodz. Every module includes the reasoning behind its inclusion, so facilitators can adapt in real time to what the room needs.
What Makes This Different
CTOs, Not Trainers
Every bootcamp is facilitated by practising CTOs from the Rational Partners bench: people who use Cursor, Claude Code, and AI agents in production every day. They have built and scaled the systems they are teaching your team to build. This is peer-level knowledge transfer, not classroom instruction. When your senior engineer pushes back on a technique, the facilitator can show them a production example from last week.
Your Codebase, Not Toy Examples
The afternoon of Day 1 and most of Day 2 are spent working on your team's actual codebase. Not a tutorial project, not a sandbox - the real code your engineers work on every day. This means the skills transfer immediately. Engineers leave the bootcamp having already applied what they learned to the systems they maintain.
Opinionated and Evidence-Based
We do not present AI tools neutrally and let your team decide. We have opinions, formed from hundreds of hours of hands-on AI development across dozens of engagements. Context engineering is the most important skill. Specifications are the real engineering work, not an afterthought. Code review discipline matters more with AI-generated code, not less. These positions are grounded in evidence and tested across multiple deliveries.
The Mindset Shift, Not Just the Tools
The hardest part of AI adoption is not learning the tools - it is changing how engineers think about their work. The shift from "I write code" to "I direct AI and review its output" is fundamental. Day 1 includes a hands-on session where engineers are not allowed to write code manually - they must direct AI to do it. This is deliberately uncomfortable, and it is the moment where the mindset shift happens.
The Business Case
Engineering teams using AI-assisted development effectively gain measurable productivity improvements. From our bootcamp deliveries:
76% of attendees save 5 or more hours per week within one week of the bootcamp. The average is 7.5 hours per week: roughly one full working day. For a team of ten engineers, that represents fifty engineering days per month recovered, without hiring anyone.
80% of attendees go on to introduce AI practices to teammates who did not attend the bootcamp. The training multiplies - the investment in ten people improves the capability of the wider team.
100% achieve measurable productivity gains within one week. Not in theory, not eventually, within their first week back at work. The bootcamp is designed so that every engineer leaves with immediately applicable skills and a working AI development environment configured for their actual projects.
For PE and VC portfolio companies, the maths are straightforward. A two-day bootcamp for ten engineers, at a cost significantly below one month's salary for a single senior hire, produces a sustained productivity improvement equivalent to adding two to three engineers to the team, permanently.
Delivered in Partnership with Mindstone
Our bootcamps are delivered in partnership with Mindstone, who provide the learning platform and delivery infrastructure. Rational Partners provides the curriculum, the CTO facilitators, and the technical expertise. Mindstone provides structured learning pathways, follow-up support, and a 30-day Slack channel for post-bootcamp questions.
The partnership means your team gets the depth of a CTO-led technical bootcamp with the structure and support of a professional learning platform. In-person delivery in London and major UK cities, with enterprise private cohorts available for organisations with larger teams.
Beyond the Bootcamp
Two days is the start, not the end. For organisations that want sustained AI transformation, we offer:
Ongoing coaching. Regular check-ins with the facilitating CTO to troubleshoot adoption challenges, review progress, and adjust the approach as your team's AI capability matures.
AI readiness assessment. For PE and VC firms wanting a structured view of AI capability across their portfolio, we deliver AI readiness assessments that identify where each company stands and where the opportunities are.
Fractional CTO support. For companies that need hands-on AI leadership beyond the bootcamp, our fractional CTO services provide embedded senior technology leadership that drives AI adoption as part of a broader technology strategy.
Related Reading
- AI Enablement Services - our broader AI strategy and readiness offering
- How Mid-Market CEOs Can Deploy AI at Lightning Speed, the security framework for AI deployment
- What Can Intercom's £100M Bet Teach PE Operators?, lessons from a bold AI transformation
- From AI Chaos to Strategic Advantage - what boards need to understand about AI
Frequently Asked Questions
Book a call to discuss your team's needs and we'll recommend the right bootcamp format - whether that's a private cohort for your company or a multi-company session in London.