UIAO Training — One Program, Two Tracks
Adapter-author onboarding session record — the Contributor-track walkthrough this narrative describes, run end-to-end with one new author. See deliveries.qmd for future sessions.
UIAO Training — One Program, Two Tracks
UIAO ships with a single training program. That program has a shared core everyone takes, and two tracks you pick from based on your relationship to the substrate.
If you are a contributor — a developer, a canon steward, a CI engineer — you want the Contributor track. You will come out of it able to land a canon-compliant PR without review blockers: frontmatter valid, schemas green, drift scan clean, tests covering the change.
If you are an operator — an agency user, an auditor, an integrator — you want the Operator track. You will come out of it able to run uiao substrate walk against your own environment, interpret the findings, and trace every output artifact back to the canonical source it came from.
Both tracks start at the same place: a shared core that establishes the substrate’s vocabulary, the three-module topology (core/ is the authority, docs/ and impl/ are consumers), the canon-consumer rule, and how a canon change lands. Once that is internalized, the two tracks diverge into their track-specific modules.
The canonical syllabus is UIAO_125 — Training Program. Companion pages:
- Test Plans — what tests govern what, catalog-style
- Project Plans — internal roadmap, agency templates
- Education — narrative-led onboarding for anyone new to UIAO
Where the former adapter-developer program went
The prior UIAO_122 Adapter Developer Training Program is now a module of the Contributor track. It was never wrong; it was just scoped narrowly. The same content is maintained there under the unified umbrella, so a developer writing their first adapter gets the substrate context first and the adapter-specific mechanics second, instead of meeting the adapter model in isolation.
Assessment
Training is done when you have landed a PR (Contributor) or produced a clean walker + drift run and correctly interpreted its output (Operator). The program is not a certification — it is a path to doing the real work.