—An AI building course for working adults
You don’t need to learn to code.
You need to learn to build.
I’m Mark Darling. I led mobile engineering at Gymshark for seven years. I’m running a four-week, online cohort that teaches working adults to ship real products with AI — websites, internal tools, prototypes — without picking up a programming language first.
The thesis
The thing that took me a decade to teach engineers, you can now do in an afternoon — if you know how to direct the work.
AI tools have collapsed the distance between an idea and a working version of it. The bottleneck is no longer syntax. It’s knowing what to ask for, how to break a problem down, what good looks like, and how to ship.
Those are the skills I spent fifteen years training engineers in. They are teachable in weeks, not years — if the curriculum stops pretending you need to write the code yourself first.
How the four weeks work
Week one
Direct the work.
Set up your tools, learn the prompt patterns that actually move work, and ship a real landing page by the end of the week.
Week two
Make it interactive.
Forms, data, authentication, real users. Build something a real person could use, not a static brochure.
Week three
Bring AI into the product.
Wire AI APIs into what you've built. Chat, generation, smart processing — make AI the feature, not just the builder.
Week four
Ship the demo.
A focused build sprint. You leave the cohort with a portfolio piece you'd be proud to send to anyone.
Who’s teaching
Mark Darling.
Fifteen years building software for companies including Elsevier, Webex, Next, and Gymshark — the last seven leading mobile engineering at Gymshark, working on apps used by millions of people in the gym, every day.
Left to teach this directly. The course is what I wish someone had handed me when I started: opinionated, practical, and designed to get you shipping quickly.
Mark Darling, 2026
From people who have worked with him
Mark gave me a chance when I knew nothing, and since then I’m excelling at a role and in a team that I love. A team that he largely helped build. He’s a supportive, pragmatic, and calm leader with many years of hard-earned experience.
Mark is not only one hell of a good developer he’s also a very talented ‘people person’. His work was always completed to the highest quality, without fail exceeding the expectations of client and peers alike.
Mark has focused on delivering value for the business, hitting all of his deadlines whilst not compromising on quality. An excellent communicator and someone I trust to not just do a job, but to do a job well.
—The first cohort
The cohort hasn’t opened yet.
Be early.
Join the waitlist and you’ll be the first to know when dates and pricing land. No countdown timers, no pressure. Just a note from me when there’s something worth saying.