From zero to a merged Mitiq PR in two weeks

Two weeks ago I'd never touched quantum computing. Today I have a merged, maintainer-reviewed tutorial in Mitiq, the field's reference error-mitigation library — built during unitaryHACK 2026, a hackathon that pays bounties for real GitHub issues.

A physics master's turns out to cover most of the distance: qubits are spin-½ systems, gates are unitaries, circuits are time-ordered products. The one new idea was the Gottesman–Knill theorem — Clifford-only circuits simulate efficiently on classical hardware — which became the foundation for Clifford Data Regression (CDR), an error-mitigation technique that builds classically-simulable “training cousins” of a noisy circuit to fit and subtract its bias. Before that, I proved entanglement to myself with a CHSH experiment: a classical bound of 2, a measured 2.834.

I paired with Claude throughout — explaining concepts, debugging numerics — but wrote and tested every line myself, disclosed per unitaryHACK's “no AI slop” policy. I differentiated my submission by pairing CDR with Clifft, a near-Clifford simulator built for exactly this regime. Three maintainers reviewed it, and each round made the tutorial substantively better — including a fix that eliminated an exponential-cost misstep.

The PR (#3052) merged June 19. What I gained: a real foothold in quantum computing, and momentum to keep building.