20 Lessons in AI (And Why I'm Doing This to Myself)
I1 built and am taking a 20-lesson AI course. And, lord willing, dragging you along for the ride2.
Not because I'm suddenly an expert. But because I learn better when I'm explaining things to other people.
So: starting tomorrow, I'm publishing 20 posts for 20 AI lessons.
The course
I found this outline on Twitter — a solid 30-day AI learning path—and fed it into Claude with some instructions about who I am and how to structure the lessons.
Boom. Claude wrote the course.
(Here’s the full curriculum, if you want to follow along.)
Each post will cover one lesson, along with whatever I built, broke, or figured out that day.
After 20 lessons, I’ll go back to a saner publishing schedule.
Why this, why now?
I’ve always been a technology fan. Whether the Merlin game3 from the early 80s, a Sports Walkman with the digital AM/FM tuner, or the iPhone 17 Pro Max, I like using tech, tinkering, thinking about it.
Today it’s all moving so fast. I don’t know whether AI will usher in utopia or kill us all with automated titanium drones.
Neither does anyone else.
I do know this: Trying to learn every tool and follow every development is futile. That’s a digital treadmill, set at warp speed, for which there is no exit4.
My goal isn’t to “keep up.” It’s to find the pieces that make life simpler, more organized, more fun. If I share those learnings and ideas with you here, maybe you can use them, also.
What to expect in the newsletter
I’ll be writing about using technology without being used by it.
That includes AI, Apple stuff, maybe video games, and occasionally objects from the past that sparked wonder in their day. From a Gen Xer who has seen a lot, but still enjoys looking to tech for more.
No hype. No doomerism.
If we’re new to each other (or getting reacquainted)
I'm 52. I'm comfortable with tech. But my programming career peaked writing HTML in Microsoft FrontPage.
And that’s the hook.
I'm not a wizard. I grew up with Max Headroom and Mario, worked through the dot-com era and the attack of the smartphones, and am now figuring out what parts of today’s tech are worth paying attention to. Worth using.
There’s so much noise. I’m going to try to cut through it and be useful.
I hope that sounds good to you.
Next up: AI Lesson one: Tokens, hallucinations, and thinking about outputs over models when choosing with LLM to work with.
Hope to see you there.5
Well, Claude and me, which sounds more like a budget-rate Amazon Prime movie than an AI learning project.
Voluntarily, of course. I’m not some kind of monster.
Merlin was a psy-op to get us ready for cell phones. Just look at the shape. All I wanted to do was make calls with it.
Remember George Jetson, trying to get off that thing? We don’t want that.
See you here. You know what I meant.