Network School Experience: What it was like, learnings and goals assessment

Making the decision to spend a month at Network School

I was 3 months into my second sabbatical, working full time on my book, when a friend told me about Network School.

At first I dismissed it as my first impression was that it was some kind of crypto cult. To be honest, I felt their website was kind of shady.

But the offer sounded great. $1500 for a month living at a 5-star hotel with healthy food included, a nice gym, sauna, cold plunge, coworking space, social events.

So after a couple of weeks I came back to it and did a bit more research.

Ok, so it wasn’t just about crypto. There seemed to be a lot of movement happening in the AI space.

Humm… this got me interested. Not only would it be a great fun adventure, but I also could use this time to promote my book and catch up with the latest AI developments. I had barely touched code since November 1st (the day I started my sabbatical and switched to focus full time on publishing my book) and fully agentic AI development happened exactly on that month (GPT-5.1 came out in Nov. 12 and Opus 4.5 in Nov. 25).

I was also really interested in experiencing more community in my life. A bunch of people living in the same building, having meals together, open to make new friends, aligned on the principles of being healthy, continuous learning and creating value. At NS, they are called Burn, Learn, Earn. Burn calories, Learn new things, Earn money by building and making partnerships.

I found some people that had been there to confirm it wasn’t a cult and that the experience was worth it, negotiated with my girlfriend the best month for us to be apart and booked my stay for May 2026.

By the time I left to NS, my goals had consolidated as:

• promote my book
• catch up with the latest AI agentic development trends
• explore and look for my next focus after the book
• push being active and eating healthy to the max (exercising every day instead of 4 times a week, eating health 95% of the time instead of 80% of the time)
• experiencing and creating community feeling

What it was like, learnings and goals assessment

Network School is a “choose your own adventure” kind of experience. It’s impossible to take everything it has to offer you, so you need to prioritize.

Wanna deep dive on crypto/blockchain or learn how to vibecode as a non-developer? You got it. Lots of talks happening every week in this space.

Wanna get jacked, big, lean, learn to do a handstand or a muscle up? You also got it. Lots of people willing to help and train together.

Wanna lock in and focus on your business? Just go to the coworking silent zone and spend hours there distraction-free, lunch and coffee are available downstairs for when you need it.

And the list goes on: content creation, public speaking, comedy improv, running, singing, meditation…

Assessment of my original goals for this trip:

Promote my book. I’ve talked with lots of people about it, received feedback and ideas on how I could repackage it and other strategies for how to approach this project from now on. I’ve also done a talk picking the mental models from the book that would really make a difference in the lives of vibecoders. Re-packaging the contents of the book to this audience seems to be a possible path I can take in the future. May was my deadline to wrap up the efforts on it but there are still some things I want to try so I’m deciding to keep at it but with a low energy/effort.

Catch up with the latest AI agentic development trends. In the beginning of the month I was making a lot of drama saying things like “Ow, the last 6 months of AI agentic software development changed everything. Are software engineers still necessary? Are software best practices still relevant? Are the mental models from my book still useful?“. Some people I talked to believed those things so strongly that I questioned if my intuition was off on this. As thinking and talking about it weren’t taking me anywhere new anymore, it was time to get my hands dirty again and see for myself where AI software development was.

I spent a couple of days building a people database system to remember all the nice people I was meeting at NS. I was scratching my own itch on the product side but using this project as a learning tool. My takeaways from this experiment were:

• Software engineering is not about writing code anymore, but about managing agents just like you would manage junior and mid-level engineers: Guide and help them to incorporate best practices and manage complexity, implement better feedback loops, fix the root causes of issues.
• The best practices and hacks people spend hours learning and getting up to date with on a weekly basis are eventually incorporated in the out-of-the-box offer from AI companies. Codex with plan mode plus the old software engineering best practices are 80/20 of being a good AI engineer nowadays (2026.06.03). Can you optimize it even more? For sure! Is it worth it? Depends on your use case, but probably not. See my current development workflow in this slide.
• I do see a future nearby where agents will evolve from being junior/mid-level engineers to senior engineers, meaning we won’t need to manage them as much. If it will happen in a month or in a couple of years I really don’t know. Even among senior software engineers there is a lot of disagreement on “the best” way to do something: how to write tests, how to structure the codebase, how to write documentation, etc. If we software engineers, as a class, never got alignment on what “the best” is, how can agents ever get there? I guess the answer is that they won’t. You will have many agents or AI frameworks tailored to different needs and preferences, just like when you hire a senior engineer you have to scan for those preferences.

Explore and look for my next focus after the book. I got a lot of ideas on this aspect. Some things floating on the top of my mind now are:

• Keep working on the people database product. Fine-tune current features and explore new ones. Explore using AI agents to do marketing and promotion, also as a learning tool.
• Create a second brain in Obsidian connected to Hermes or Claude code and telegram. Use case can be the same as the people database but also keeping an organized notes of books, movies and trips recommendations.
• Spend more time writing

Push being active and eating healthy to the max. Did a good job here because NS is the perfect environment for it: A paradisiac island full of active people, sports events, high protein healthy meals and you don’t spend time commuting or cooking. I didn’t lift more weights than before, but just the fact that I was eating cleaner, with more protein and being more active helped me get in better shape. According to the scale at NS gym, my body fat went down from 15% to 13.1% while my weight went up from 83.7kg to 85kg.

Experiencing and creating community feeling. This was the biggest win of this trip for me and where my biggest takeaways came from:

• Community helps me stay in the present, I’m just happier (or content) when around people I like.

To be honest, I was already aware of that. Being a digital nomad with some close friends allowed us to plan little things like Wednesday Dinner Nights, which were just small dinners during the week. That one event in the middle of the week made a huge difference on my well-being.

But at NS this community feeling is taken to the maximum.

I loved going out of my room and bumping into friends on the elevator or the hotel lobby.

I loved hosting v60 brewing sessions for friends or random people that I met on the way (I took some nice coffee beans from Brazil to share with people, and that was one of the best decisions I’ve made before the trip).

I loved jumping on unplanned little adventures and having an awesome time (like when a friend invited me to go climbing at the mall nearby, when another friend convinced me to join the NS cup and I spent the day playing soccer and volleyball, or when yet another friend invited me to do a Whim Hof breathing session followed by cold plunges).

All these moments with people helped me stay in the present and enjoy it.

• Feels good and right to be around self-motivated people who are always pushing themselves to be their best

It was inspiring to listen to some friends sing their first song in public, only after one month of classes. It was inspiring to meet people here and there building their own business and being super excited about it. People pushing themselves to be healthier, more athletic, more outgoing, more social, more in the present. Everyone had their own battle, and everyone was ok sharing where they were in their journey. It kind of pushes you to do the same.

And people support each other, cheer each other, try to help each other whenever they can. I felt inspired by this growth mindset. Felt that they were my people.

I’m thinking a lot on how parts of it can be replicated in São Paulo, where longer commuting times and routine makes people less open to make friends or go on spontaneous activities. I have some ideas that I might try, for example, setting up climbing/calisthenics groups once a week. One thing I’m internalizing more and more is that community is about being available and providing value to the people around you. Organizing the coffee brewing session was one of my favorite things at NS so I might explore other ways of doing this locally, even if here in São Paulo.

Conclusion

My experience of Network School in May 2026 was awesome and I’m super grateful to have lived it.

If you are reading this post because you are considering a visit, remember that this was my experience in May 2026 and that things might not be the same when you get there (some things might have improved and some things might have gotten worse).

”When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?” Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place - only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Unless you are in a place right now, you can only speak of it in past-tense.” - Derek Sivers, https://sive.rs/4d

If you have any questions or thoughts about this blog post, feel free to connect with me at leomaxfyi@gmail.com.

If you decide to sign up for NS, this link gives you 25% off discount.

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