Who this is for, and what it won't do

Most writing about AI is aimed at one of two people: a developer who already knows what a config file is, or someone who has decided this is the most important thing that has ever happened. There's a large group in between that nobody writes for.

They're good at something. They can build a five-branch approval workflow, run a content calendar single-handed, keep a household of five on one shared calendar, or talk a teenager through a first job application. They have never opened a terminal and have no plans to. When they read that AI could help, the advice they find either assumes a background they don't have, or talks to them like a child.

This is for them. Probably for you, or you'd have closed the tab.

What's here

Guides that each do one task. Every one says what you'll have when you're finished, roughly how long it takes, what you need before you start, and (the part most guides skip) what to do when it breaks. Nothing here takes four hours or ends in a certificate.

If you want the concepts taught properly, Google, Microsoft, AWS and OpenAI all give away genuinely good free courses. Go take one. This is the other thing: you have something due this afternoon and you'd like it finished.

Who writes it

I spend my working life configuring enterprise business systems and writing the specifications other people build from. I have also created some apps that use AI in different ways. So I'm not writing this as an AI expert. I'm writing it as someone in roughly your position, who has spent a lot of evenings working out which parts of this are useful and which parts are noise, and who got tired of guides written for somebody else.

There's no byline on the site, which is deliberate for now. Judge the guides on whether they work.

What this site won't do

• No sponsorship, no affiliate links. Nothing on the tools page pays anything, and outbound links carry nofollow. If that ever changes it will be said in plain sight, at the top.
• No claims I can't show. You won't read that anything here will halve your workload. I don't know that, and neither do the people selling it.
• No pretending AI is reliable. It invents things, in the same confident tone it uses when it's right. Every guide assumes you'll check the output, and says where it tends to go wrong.
• No signup wall. Every guide is readable and every template downloads without an account or an email address, and that isn't going to change. New guides are announced in an RSS feed, which is a plain link your browser or a reader app can follow without giving anyone your details. If a mailing list is ever added it will be optional and infrequent, and it will never sit between you and the content.

Corrections

Something wrong, out of date, or unclear? Tell me at [email protected] and I'll fix it. Corrections get made in place; anything significant gets a dated note so you can see what changed.

Not sure where to begin? Start here, or read the plain answers first if the whole subject makes you uneasy.