12-hour day operating system
You asked for 12-hour days. That is survivable only if it is not 12 hours of papers. Anthropic performance work is a craft. Craft is built by making things, then studying why they were slow.
6 days/week × 12 hours = 72 hours/week. Take the 7th day almost off (walk, light Anki, no new material). If you skip rest you will fail the take-home by being sloppy, which is the same as being slow.
Daily template (local time, pick a 8:00 start)
| Clock | Block | What |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00–8:20 | Boot | Sleep, body, one sentence: today's artifact. No Twitter, no HN, no Discord. |
| 8:20–11:20 | Deep 1 (3h) | Hardest making of the day. Kernel, derivation, CSAPP lab, take-home cycles. Phone in another room. |
| 11:20–12:00 | Walk + retrieve | No headphones-as-podcast-dump. Recite what you just did. Write 5 Anki cards from holes. |
| 12:00–12:40 | Eat | |
| 12:40–15:10 | Deep 2 (2.5h) | Second hard thing, often the other track (if Deep 1 was metal, this is model, or reverse). |
| 15:10–15:30 | Break | Outside. |
| 15:30–17:30 | Paper / book (2h) | One paper or one textbook chapter, with exercises. Notes are a derivation, not a summary. |
| 17:30–18:00 | Eat / reset | |
| 18:00–19:30 | Deliberate practice (1.5h) | Interview reps: timed CodeSignal-style implementation, or a whiteboard derivation, or a system-design drill out loud. |
| 19:30–20:00 | Write | Public artifact: git commit + 10–20 line log in log.md. If you cannot write what you did, you did not do it. |
That is ~11.5 hours of clock, ~9 hours of real cognitive work. The remaining slack is transitions. Do not "make it 12 hours of Deep" to feel serious. That is how you write buggy kernels.
Weekly rhythm
- Mon–Tue: new hard material + new code
- Wed: profile / debug day. No new papers. Make Tuesday's thing correct and measured.
- Thu: paper-heavy, but still one coding lab
- Fri: take-home sport (Anthropic sim) or a from-scratch reimplementation
- Sat: long build (4–6h on one artifact) + review
- Sun: off-ish. Anki 30 min. Walk. Sleep 8+.
Monthly checkpoint (non-negotiable)
On the last Saturday, you must have one public artifact with:
- repo link
- what you built
- numbers (cycles, TFLOPS, tokens/s, loss curve)
- what was wrong the first time
- a 500–1500 word writeup
If the month has no artifact, the month did not happen. Studying is not an artifact.
Spaced repetition
Anki decks you will build yourself (do not download a "transformer deck" and feel prepared):
- Numerics and IEEE + GPU arch facts you keep missing
- Formula → complexity → IO cost cards (attention, collectives, KV cache)
- Paper claims: one card per number you actually need (Chinchilla tokens/param, FlashAttention IO reduction)
- Anthropic-specific: CAI procedure steps, RSP levels, take-home machine constraints
Review Anki only on the walk and Sunday. Do not let Anki eat Deep 1.
Burnout rules (you will ignore these once; do not twice)
- Sleep < 7h: cut Deep 2, do not cut sleep
- Three days of "I read but wrote nothing": that is a failed week, restart with a smaller artifact
- Pain in wrists / back: you need this body for 12–24 months. Fix the chair.
- If you start optimizing your note system, you are avoiding the take-home.
Compute
You will need, in order:
- Laptop + CPU is enough for months 1–2 (from-scratch GPT on Shakespeare/TinyStories, CSAPP, take-home sim is CPU)
- One consumer GPU (4090 / 5090 / used 3090) or a cloud T4/L4 for Triton/CUDA
- Occasional A100/H100 hours (Lambda, RunPod, CoreWeave, academic credits) for FA2-competitive numbers and Nsight
- Do not wait for an H100 to start. The take-home is a Python simulator. Most of the skill is independent of the SKU.
Nsight Compute on a laptop GPU still teaches the questions. The absolute TFLOPS change; the habit of asking does not.