Students should build now. We’ll pay for the tools.

The best time to learn how to build software is while you are a student. You have time, curiosity and fewer things to lose. What you often do not have is money for the tools. A good coding agent, a frontier model subscription, a domain, hosting and some GPU time can easily cost more each month than a student spends on food. That should not decide who gets to build.

So we are paying for it. From today, Leemer Group is offering students a full stack for agentic coding, free, and a small fund for the ones who go on to start something.

Why students, and why now

Agentic coding has changed what one person can make. A student with a good agent, a clear idea and the habit of checking the work can now ship something real in a weekend: a tool for their society, a study aid, a small business, a research project with a working interface. The skills that matter are no longer only syntax and frameworks. They are deciding what to build, describing it well, reviewing what the agent produced and knowing when it is wrong.

Those skills are learned by doing, and doing costs money. When the tools sit behind a monthly bill, the students who can afford them pull ahead and the rest wait until they have a job. We would rather they started now.

There is a selfish reason too. Leemer Group began in February 2023 as one person building Leemer Chat. Almost everything we have made since, from Critique.sh to the Born2 models, came from building first and asking permission later. The next group like ours is probably sitting in a lecture hall in Waterford, Cork, Dublin or somewhere much further away. We want to meet them early.

What every accepted student gets

• Critique Code All-in, free.Our €30 a month plan, at no cost, so you have an agentic coding harness with independent review of what your agent writes.
• One frontier subscription of your choice.Choose one of ChatGPT Plus, Claude.ai Pro, the Command GOAT plan or OpenCode Go. We pay for it.
• Your domain and hosting.We cover the cost of a domain and hosting for the project you build, so it lives on the real internet with your name on it.
• €100 GPU compute grant.€100 of GPU compute to train, fine-tune or run models.
• €100 in Born model API credits.Credits for the Leemer Labs Born models, including Born2-9B, our code-review specialist.

The package runs for three months. It is a small boost to your start in agentic coding, not a scholarship with strings. Build what you want.

For promising young founders

Some students will build something that wants to become a company. For them we go further, with a founder package worth up to €3,000:

• Up to €1,000 in cash.An angel cheque from Leemer Group.
• Up to €1,000 in Leemer Labs API credits.Matching the cheque.
• Up to €1,000 in tools and usage creditsfrom partners such as Vercel, Stripe and more, so hosting, payments and the rest of your stack are covered while you find your first users.

On top of the package:

• Early access to our upcoming modelsbefore they are released publicly.
• A free upgrade to Critique Code All-in at €150 a monthour largest plan.

A thousand euro will not build a company. It can pay for the first users, the first month of real infrastructure or the confidence to keep going after the free credits run out. We would rather write many small cheques early than a few large ones late.

More than credits

Tools and money help, but most early builders need people. Students in the programme can also get:

• Office hours with our team.Time with Repath Khan and the engineers behind Critique.sh and Leemer Labs, to talk through an idea, a bug or a decision you are stuck on.
• Reviews of your code and product.An honest look at what you have built, the way we review our own work before it ships.
• Help with grants and funding.Advice on what to prepare for supports like the ones in our guide to funding AI projects in Ireland, and introductions where we can make them.
• A chance to shape our models.Test Born models early, tell us where they fail and see your feedback go into the next release.
• Your work in front of people.We will feature student projects in this journal and share them with our network.
• Potential internships.Students who build well with us may be offered an internship at Leemer Group, working on real products from Waterford or remotely.

We cannot promise every student every one of these. We can promise to take you seriously.

What we ask in return

Build something and show us. A link, a repository, a short note on what worked and what did not. If the agent got something badly wrong, we especially want to hear about it: that is how Critique.sh and Born2 get better.

We also ask you to review what your agent writes before you ship it. Free tools make it easy to produce a lot of code. Learning to check it is the part that makes you an engineer.

How to apply

Email ray@critique.sh with the subject Student builders. Tell us:

• your name, where you study and what you are studying;
• what you want to build, in a few sentences;
• which subscription you choose: ChatGPT Plus, Claude.ai Pro, Command GOAT or OpenCode Go;
• anything you have already made, if you have something to show. Nothing is fine too.

If you are applying as a founder, add what you are building, who it is for and what you would do with the cheque. We read every application ourselves.