Tutor notes. For the person running the sessions.

Tutor checklist: before Session 1

Verify (ideally a day or two before)

• [ ] They have completed student-setup.md. Ask for a screenshot of Claude Code answering hello. Budget the first 15 minutes of Session 1 for repairs regardless.
• [ ] Their Pro subscription is active and signed in on their machine (auth is per-device; a working login on your Mac proves nothing).
• [ ] Xcode actually downloaded and opened once, the single most likely setup failure is "it's still downloading". It isn't needed until Session 6, but chase it during the planning half anyway, the download is enormous.
• [ ] iPhone: trusted the Mac, Developer Mode on (or they know it appears after the first build).
• [ ] GitHub 2FA sorted, the first push will demand authentication; let Claude walk the auth flow, but know it cold yourself.
• [ ] Netlify account exists and is connected to them GitHub (the sign-up-with-GitHub route). Pre-authorise what you can: Session 1's /ship must end in a URL, not an auth maze.
• [ ] gstack installs cleanly today: run the URL-paste install on a scratch setup and /gstack-upgrade on your own. Know this session's version and its quirks before they meet them.
• [ ] Their itch list exists. If it's empty, have fallbacks ready (below).

Mac & iOS gotchas to expect

• Xcode first launch eats 20+ minutes installing components, that's why setup says open it once before the course.
• Free Apple accounts: 7-day app expiry (re-run from Xcode re-signs), 3-app limit, "Untrusted Developer" on first launch (trust in Settings). All on the iOS corner cheatsheet.
• Device trust dialogs appear at the least convenient moment; a cable beats wireless for the first build.
• Desktop permission prompts look different from the CLI they'll see in YouTube videos. Pre-empt: "same agent, same questions, different clothes."
• Simulator runtime downloads: the first simulator boot may pull another multi-GB download. Trigger it yourself on their machine before Session 6 if you can.

Fallback itch projects (biomed-flavoured, one-shot-sized)

1. Flashcard generator: paste lecture notes, get flip-through flashcards on a single HTML page. (Best fallback, and the best seed for the agile product: it grows naturally, slice by slice, across sessions 2 and 3.)
2. Revision timetable builder: modules + exam dates in, printable session-by-session plan out.
3. Lab-calculation helper: dilutions, molarity, unit conversions on one page. They'll know instantly whether it's correct, which makes it a great verification teaching prop.

Your demo kit (things from your own setup to have ready)

• One of your deployed static sites (doubleyummy) as a "this is where shipping gets you" show-and-tell (Session 1)
• Your 4-line ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md + the deliberately awful 80-line anti-example (Session 4 exhibit A, write the bad one in advance)
• A real /spec output from one of your own projects (Session 4, "this is what decided looks like")
• A real /canary run to narrate (Session 2) and a real /retro output (Session 3)
• The gstack repo URL, https://github.com/garrytan/gstack, on a sticky note for the Session 1 set-piece

Arc-by-arc PM briefing (your vocabulary, per arc)

• Sessions 2–3 (agile): tutor notes speak Scrum, sprint, backlog, increment, Definition of Done, velocity (sprint two only), sprint review, retrospective. You're PO coach and scrum master, never the PO.
• Sessions 4–8 (waterfall capstone): tutor notes speak PRINCE2/PMBOK, business case, initiation, baseline, stage gates / end-stage assessments, tolerances, exception management, closure, lessons-learned register. Use the words sparingly with them, freely in your own head; the notes flag which ones to say out loud.
• The synthesis question the whole course builds to (Session 8): "which lifecycle for the next project, and why?", every arc's notes seed it.

Cost sanity

Pro's limits are per-5-hour rolling windows. An enthusiastic beginner can hit them in one long session of big prompts, and gstack's review skills are token-hungry: the heavy sessions are Session 2 (/autoplan plus the first deploy chain), Session 5 (four gates + design studio + roadmaps), and Session 8 (two gates + the hardening sweeps). Schedule those early in the session, never at 11pm against the window; teach /context and "small prompts, small diffs" from day one. It's a habit and a budget control.