> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.getvirtualbrain.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Academy: Building AI Apps

> A practical course on designing, prompting, and shipping reliable VirtualBrain AI Apps

This course turns the way your firm works into reliable, repeatable [AI Apps](/features/apps/overview). It is built for the people who design Apps: the part of the team that encodes a methodology once so everyone runs it in minutes.

You don't need to be technical, but you do need to know the work. The Academy covers the handful of design decisions that decide whether an App holds up: how data reaches each block, how to write prompts that hold up across runs, and how to keep the output identical every time.

## What you'll learn

<CardGroup cols={3}>
  <Card title="How an AI App works" icon="diagram-project" href="/apps-academy/how-apps-work">
    The multi-block pipeline, and the three things that decide quality.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Key concepts" icon="book" href="/apps-academy/key-concepts">
    The shared vocabulary every prompt and design discussion relies on.
  </Card>

  <Card title="User inputs" icon="keyboard" href="/apps-academy/user-inputs">
    Collecting clean inputs from the people who run your App.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Knowledge Sources" icon="database" href="/apps-academy/knowledge-sources">
    Inline vs. Knowledge Source, and Brains vs. uploads: how a block knows what it knows.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Passing data between blocks" icon="arrow-right-arrow-left" href="/apps-academy/passing-data">
    Routing the hand-offs between blocks, and how to get them right.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Prompting" icon="pen-nib" href="/apps-academy/prompting">
    The standard prompt template and the ten rules that matter most.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Output format" icon="table-cells" href="/apps-academy/output-format">
    Engineering the same layout on every run.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Prototyping with AI" icon="wand-magic-sparkles" href="/apps-academy/prototyping">
    Go from idea to working prototype in minutes with the built-in assistants.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Dos, don'ts & checklist" icon="clipboard-check" href="/apps-academy/checklist">
    The fundamentals on one page, plus a pre-launch checklist.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## How to use it

Read it in order the first time: each section builds on the one before. After that, the [Dos & Don'ts and pre-launch checklist](/apps-academy/checklist) work as a standing reference you return to before every launch.

<Tip>
  **Ship one real App first.** Pick one recurring, high-value workflow and put it into an App. Learn the rules here, then apply them to work you already do every week.
</Tip>

Start with [How an AI App works](/apps-academy/how-apps-work), or jump straight into the [no-code builder](/features/apps/building-apps).