This is a quickstart, not a translation. The lesson bodies of this course are written in Chinese and stay in Chinese — that is a deliberate, budgeted decision, not an oversight. See §1 for exactly what is English and what is not, and §7 for the honest gap list.

Level 1 is an 8-day, hands-on course that takes someone who has never been on a client site and walks them through one complete FDE delivery chain — producing 8 portfolio artifacts and 8 gate checks (G1–G8) along the way.

• Total effort: ~22 hours (Day 1 is a full 6-hour day; days 2–8 are ~2.25 h each)
• Prerequisites: install software, copy-paste terminal commands, read a table. No Python required. Every command ships in a copyable form.
• Cost to start: ¥0 — the reading room, the toolchain and the self-study path are permanently free. See §5.

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1. Language policy

Surface	Language	Notes
/course (web reading room)	Chinese	All lesson bodies
/en/course (web reading room)	English chrome + Chinese bodies	Navigation, titles, rail labels and UI strings are translated; the lessons carry lang="zh-Hans" so browsers and screen readers segment correctly
course-level-1/ chapters (00–15)	Chinese	The source of truth; the web reader renders these files
This file (en/README.md)	English	Quickstart + orientation only
examples/README.md, CLI --help	English	Code-facing surfaces
Repo root README.md, docs/features-en.md	English	Platform-facing docs

Why the lessons are not translated. Translating a whole chapter set into English is a real one-off cost with an ongoing maintenance tail: every time a gate changes, two texts drift apart. A quickstart is cheap to keep true, and it answers the question an English-speaking reader actually arrives with — what is this, can I run it, and what do I get. Detailed pedagogy stays in one place, in one language, with a single owner.

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2. The 8-day arc

Day 1 builds the worldview and a first working chain. Days 2–8 each end with one gate and one artifact you can show a manager or a client.

Day	Focus	Gate	Artifact you walk away with
D1	Worldview + toolchain; run a miniature end-to-end chain	G1 smoke	Artifact 1 · Mini-chain evidence + the one-page FDE worldview
D2	Define the boundary — who is the client, what does success mean	G2 boundary	Artifact 2 · Engagement Charter (profile / stakeholder map / success criteria)
D3	Connect to data and profile it	G3 data	Artifact 3 · Data health report (fields / missing / PII / distributions)
D4	Forge a corpus from the raw sample	G4 corpus	Artifact 4 · CorpusReport + a client-facing explanation with no jargon in it
D5	Validate — build an eval set, find the bad cases	G5 evidence	Artifact 5 · Demonstrable prototype + eval results + 3 bad cases
D6	Make it operable	G6 ops	Artifact 6 · Runbook + SLO card + on-call handover card
D7	Hand it over and distil the reusable skill	G7 handoff	Artifact 7 · Handoff package + 1 distilled skill
D8	Portfolio + defence	G8 graduation	Artifact 8 · Portfolio in three packagings (job search / internal report / freelance)

There is also an entry gate, G0, taken before class: environment self-check passes, the learning contract is read, and the self-assessment radar is filled in.

How gates actually behave

• blocker vs warning. A blocker gate stops you — you do not advance until it passes. A warning gate can be passed with the miss recorded, and it costs you score.
• Resubmission. You get one resubmission within 24 hours at full credit. Later than that it is a deferred pass (延期通过) and the artifact is capped at grade B.
• Waivers are recorded, in the certificate notes. Nothing is silently granted.
• G8 requires at least 6 of G1–G7 to have passed, a complete 8-artifact index, and a live defence — where the question you will be asked is "where is the evidence?"

Gate semantics in full: 03 Evaluation & gate checks §3. Per-gate student self-check card: 06 Student handbook §6.

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3. Run it now (no API key needed)

The whole chain runs offline. The LLM step is optional and only ever an accelerator.

git clone https://github.com/ai-guru-global/fde-scope.git
cd fde-scope
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# 1. Connect — profile a sample CSV
fde-scope connect --type csv --source examples/quickstart_csv/sample_tickets.csv

# 2. Forge a corpus and get an auditable HTML report
fde-scope corpus --input examples/quickstart_csv/sample_tickets.csv \
                 --out reports/corpus_report.html

# 3. Read the course in a browser
fde-scope web          # http://127.0.0.1:8080/course  and  /en/course

fde-scope web binds loopback only. Binding elsewhere is refused unless you set FDE_SCOPE_ALLOW_REMOTE=1 — the local workbench has no authentication by design, so exposing it would expose your engagements and journals to the network.

Optional, and only optional. Adding --llm to corpus synthesizes gap-filling samples with MiMo; it reads FDE_SCOPE_MIMO_API_KEY from the environment. Keys are never written to manifests, reports, engagement JSON, logs or screenshots. If you have no key, skip the flag — you lose a convenience, not a capability.

Don't want a terminal at all? That is supported. The course stacks a process and gate layer on top of whatever coding or office agent you already use; it does not require you to switch tools or to live in a shell. See 01 Course design §6.4 and 11 Tooling & environment for the no-key degraded paths.

More on the zero-dependency path: examples/README.md.

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4. Honesty boundary

These five statements are load-bearing. They are repeated on the sales page, in class and at the closing session, so that nothing you were promised at purchase gets softened later:

1. No employment promise, no income promise. "变现" in this course means turning capability into artifacts you can show and hand to a client — a portfolio, a set of talking points, one chain you ran yourself. It does not mean a raise, a job, or freelance revenue.
2. Every client case is fictional. The cases (茶语万象, 迅捷出行, 南湾汽车, …) are demo data. They are not real companies, and the course requires you to label adapted cases as demonstrations.
3. The certificate proves in-course completion only. It says what you did inside the course, nothing about the market. Grade A includes a 表现信 — a factual statement of what you wrote, where the evidence is, and how you performed. It is not a referral and implies no interview.
4. AI assistance must be declared. Using an assistant is allowed and expected. Not saying so is what fails you on the honesty axis.
5. No real client name, and no PII, anywhere — not in the repo, not in the class group, not in any third-party tool.

Full statement: README.md 诚实边界 · certificate scope: 03 §6 · marketing discipline: 08 Operations §11.

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5. What it costs (L0–L3)

Four tiers. Three of them are priced per cohort by a published formula; one of them is genuinely free and is not a trial.

Tier	What it is	Includes	Excludes	Price
L0 Public	The open subset of the self-study edition	All lesson text in the web reading room, the toolchain, the self-study path	Live classes, marking, defence and grading, certificate, Q&A windows	¥0, permanently free. No quota, no signup
L1 Standard	The default product	8 days live + teaching assistants at 1:15–20 + daily gates + defence and grading + certificate + closing pack	Shadow project, real client scenarios, invoiced billing	Break-even ÷ (1 − target margin), computed per cohort
L2 Shadow project	L1 plus supervised real work	Everything in L1 + admission to a real small scenario + mentor at ≤1:3 + double-signed de-identified output	Guaranteed client adoption, guaranteed employment or income, a seat in the next cohort	L1 + mentor hours + compliance and de-identification labour
L3 Corporate	Private training	3 concentrated days + 1 week of homework + client's de-identified scenario + assessment alignment + invoicing	Seats in public cohorts, individual discounts	Per-project: day rate × headcount + hours for custom cases

Tier definitions in full, including the cost formula and the read-this-table discipline: 04 Delivery handbook §1.2. Why L0 can be free forever: the marginal cost of one more reader is zero.

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6. Where things live

You want	Read
The history, principles and economics behind FDE	00 Methodology, history, principles
What the course teaches and why it is designed this way	01 Course design
The day-by-day schedule	02 Daily syllabus
Gates, rubrics, portfolio grades, certificate rules	03 Evaluation & gates
Pricing, scheduling, staffing, contingency, delivery acceptance	04 Delivery handbook
Student task cards and self-check lists	06 Student handbook
The 5 fictional client cases and role-play scripts	07 Scenarios & cases
Environment setup and the no-key degraded paths	11 Tooling & environment
Glossary and every copyable template	12 Glossary & templates
Competitor comparison and the go-to-market page	13 GTM page & competitor comparison
Continuing on your own after day 8; the shadow-project track	14 Post-course depth & shadow projects
Certification, third-party paths, results measurement	15 Credibility & results measurement
The platform this course is built around	fde-scope repo README · docs/features-en.md

The lesson files are Chinese-named; the link text above is the gloss, the link target is the real file.

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7. What is still missing

Stated plainly, because a quickstart that oversells itself is the first credibility failure:

• No translated lesson bodies. This page orients you and gets you running; it does not teach the 8 days. If you need to take the course, the lessons are Chinese — that is a budgeted decision, described in §1, not a gap waiting to close by itself.
• In-class deliverables are Chinese-first. The 8 artifacts, the 5 fictional case companies and the client-facing talking-point scripts are all written in Chinese. If the client you have in mind briefs in English, the scripts need adapting; the course does not ship an English script bank.
• /en/course is verified for chrome, not for teaching. Its test asserts the navigation and titles are translated and that the page declares the lesson text as Chinese. Nothing asserts an English pedagogy exists — because it doesn't.

Already bilingual, for the record — /en/glossary carries all 82 terms with English definitions, and /en/certification is fully paired. The vocabulary of the domain is not gated behind Chinese; only the 8-day teaching is.

If any of these blocks you, say so in an issue — the gap list is reviewed per cohort, and demand is what moves it.