Learn to code with AI. By shipping a real product.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk, have raised £5m+ for their own companies, and have been AI-native since the week ChatGPT shipped.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
‘Learn to code with AI’ usually means watching someone prompt their way to a screenshot. That is not coding. A real production system needs auth, billing, observability, evals, error handling, and a developer who can read what the agent has written and ship the next thing on top of it. The Academy is twelve weeks of doing exactly that — on the same stack we use ourselves.
Coding · learn the agentic workflow, not the syntax
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex as your editor — not a tab you flip to. Auth, billing, Postgres + pgvector, evals, deploys, observability. The agentic workflow that has replaced "learn a syntax first" as the on-ramp into engineering. A deployed product by week twelve, not a demo on a laptop — written by you, with the agent doing the keyboard work.
Commercials · learn-to-code-with-AI as a productised offer
AI-assisted coding is the new "build me a website" line item for SMBs — £3-15k for a custom build that beats the agencies on speed and the no-code tools on flexibility. Pricing, discovery, a one-page pilot agreement, the first paying customer. A paid pilot by week six — for many graduates, a productised AI-build offer.
Investment · raising on AI-native dev tooling
Cursor ($2.5bn), Lovable ($200m+), Bolt.new, Magic, v0, Replit Agent, Cognition (Devin), Granola, ChatPRD — the AI-native dev tooling and prompt-first product layer is the densest funded category of the cycle. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I have never written code before. Is this for me?
Yes. We have taken students from zero code to a deployed product in twelve weeks. The bar is willingness to do the work; the on-ramp with AI tooling is shorter than at any point in the last twenty years.
How is this different from a vibe coding course?
A vibe coding course teaches you to get to a screenshot. We teach you to ship a system that handles real users, real money, and real failure modes. Both are valid; only one is a career.
What AI tools will I learn?
Cursor and Claude Code are the daily drivers. Codex appears where it fits. You will also learn how to evaluate model outputs, write evals, and harden agentic features for production.
Will I learn a specific programming language?
Modern web stacks — typically Laravel + Blade or Next.js depending on the project — Postgres, Tailwind. The point is shipping a real product, so the stack matches what the project demands.
Where is the course held?
In person, in Derby. Twelve students, twelve weeks, two operators in the room. The case for being in the room is the case for the course.
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us where you are today — first line of code or first year of work — and what you would build. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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