AI Engineering from Scratch is a free, open-source curriculum that teaches people to build AI systems through lessons and reusable artifacts such as prompts, skills, agents, and MCP servers. It is for learners who want practical foundations or want to create AI applications, and the catalogue skills support parts of that curriculum.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch/main/.claude/skills/mcpa-certification/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratchWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch/mcpa-certification)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch/mcpa-certification"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch/mcpa-certification/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch/mcpa-certification"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch/mcpa-certification.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk warn
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00091 | $0.03281 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00036 | $0.01312 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00656 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00328 |
Grade A, and why
mcpa-certification scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 337 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
MCPA Certification Tutor
Turn the repository into a step-by-step tutor. Make the learner explain, predict, run, build, and defend each decision. Do not reduce the course to a reading list.
One invocation handles one of four modes: onboarding, one lesson, an
assessment, or remediation. Resume from MCPA-CERTIFICATION.md when it
exists.
Load the source of truth
Prefer a local clone. Locate the nearest parent containing
certifications/mcpa/program.json. Otherwise read files from:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch/main/<path>
Read these files as needed:
- Program policy and current verification date:
certifications/mcpa/program.json - Ordered route and domain map:
certifications/mcpa/tracks/mcpa-f.json - Lesson:
<lesson-path>/docs/en.md - Scenario runner or validator:
<lesson-path>/code/main.py - Tests:
<lesson-path>/code/tests/test_*.py - Reference artifact:
<lesson-path>/outputs/ - Lesson quiz:
<lesson-path>/quiz.json - Diagnostic and three full mocks: the
assessmentspaths declared by the track - Exam-fact citations and retrieval dates:
certifications/mcpa/research/source-verification-ledger.md - Protocol facts for the 2026-07-28 revision, with sources and resolved
conflicts:
certifications/mcpa/research/mcp-2026-07-28-brief.md - Wire-shape checker for lesson transcripts:
scripts/check_mcpa_wire.py
Read the mcpa-f track JSON at the start of every session. Its lessons
array is the route order. Do not invent a route, lesson, domain weight, exam
fact, or official policy from memory. Cite
research/source-verification-ledger.md for exam facts such as time limit,
fee, validity, retakes, or domain weight; when the ledger or program.json
says a fact is not published, such as the item count or passing score, say so
instead of estimating one.
Teach the 2026-07-28 protocol revision as current. It has no initialize
handshake, no sessions, and no Mcp-Session-Id: every request carries its
protocol version and client capabilities in _meta, and server/discover
tells a client what a server supports. Present older revisions only as what
changed, and present Roots, Sampling, Logging, and Dynamic Client
Registration as deprecated features that still work until their removal
window. When the learner's notes or memory disagree with the protocol brief,
the brief and the specification pages it cites win.
What ships with it
1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 7d ago Changed · +17 lines 683593ee98e6
- 1mo ago First seen · 320 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A 61aa9168f7c7
mcpa-certification is a skill published in the GitHub repository rohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch (77,007 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 3,281 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-26.
mcpa-certification compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mcpa-certificationrohitg00/ai-engineering-from-scratch | Skill | 77k | yesterday | MIT | A | 91 | Claude Code, Codex |
| playwrightopenai/openai-agents-python | Skill | 31k | today | MIT | A | 19 | Claude Code, Codex |
| show-mehumanlayer/humanlayer | Skill | 13k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 25 | Claude Code |
| eli5genkit-ai/genkit | Skill | 6.6k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 16 | Claude Code, Codex |
| deck-course-modulenexu-io/html-anything | Skill | 9.4k | 24d ago | Apache-2.0 | A | 25 | Claude Code, Codex |
| skill-contract-reviewerfancyboi999/ai-engineering-from-scratch-zh | Skill | 1.3k | 3d ago | MIT | A | 24 | Claude Code, Codex |
| video-sopscreenpipe/screenpipe | Skill | 22k | today | none | A | 22 | Claude Code, Codex |