I’ll admit it.
I have watched the AI industry, and with daily changes and ongoings, recognized that it is nearly impossible for someone overseeing L&D, Training, or whatever department to send out this information to their employees, customers/clients, students and members.
Within this information, one can see there are serious repeativeness that impacts day to day with AI, that despite the hearing from C-level people, Training and L&D professionals, HR staff and so forth, vendors in the industry, continue to ignore.
They aren’t the only ones. I openly blame the CLOs, C-level HR, and similar who have gotten so wrapped up into AI, they honestly believe their employees, more so, have figured it out.
In some ways this is true, but overall, it is a fallacy.
And therein lies the challenge.
Go on LinkedIn and see the daily raves about what you can do with AI and instructional design.
AI with learning and training.
AI this and that.
All wonderful stuff, and yet, nobody talks about tokens.
Nobody mentions this thing called costs, or that the latest AI model from whatever vendor, increases your token fees, isn’t always the best for what you are doing, heck may not even be the best model from the vendor itself.
If they mention open source, they fail to mention Heretic (available on GitHub), which can break through any guardrail.
Where is the information regarding OpenAI and Hugging face, where an OpenAI agent went rogue. Now it is being reported it wasn’t just Hugging Face but also four other sites.
I have yet to see anything regarding prompt injection – which while it is something you should NEVER do with your resume, does exist. Not only that but prompt injection can work with AI in general.
Vendors love to tell you about all the RAGs, and guardrails and how your content if placed into the platform, won’t have hallucinations.
As I have written many times before, that is 100% not true.
Willy Wonka’s golden ticket in a candy bar right now, has a higher probability of seeing the candy master, than the idea your content within the vendor’s platform, is always 100% accurate.
Plenty of folks note that I often talk in highbrow when it comes to AI, and I openly and truly get it.
AI isn’t as simple one might think – and by trying to explain it in a blog post – that won’t be the size of the Grand Canyon can be overwhelming.
Which is why I created eight guides for you, which you can view, and download.
Share them with others – or just keep them for yourself, laughing to yourself.
I’ll be clear, that I put some parts of the guides with my own prompts, and what I was seeking.
If you know what you are doing, you can get exactly what you need from AI.
You must though always, always verify that the information is accurate.
You can make edits within the output – it’s okay and honestly you should.
I can’t tell you about my secrets on how or what I did, when it comes to ensuring that what I wanted to accomplish could be done so using AI, in this case, Claude.
Nor can I share with you what model I used, but I can say although I have access to their latest model, I chose not to do so.
I left out a more in-depth understanding of MCP (Model Context Protocols), but this is something you want your learning system to have, either now, or by the end of 2027.
The Eight Guides
In building them out, I wanted the following
- Easy to read and understand for anyone who is new to AI, or seeking information that doesn’t show up like a textbook
- Provide real-life examples – for clarity – so that you can say “AHH HA,” I get it.
- Tapping into the big three for adult learning – Comprehension, Retention and Synthesis – the latter is something that so many folks fail to do, and yet is the most important one of all of the three
- Right to the Point – Again, you want to bore yourself reading from a textbook? If you do, there are plenty I used as a door stopper in grad school. They actually work quite well. Then I sold them back to the bookstore and used the cash for gifts for my family – be honest, you did the same thing.
The Topics
- AI Terminology Guide – I made sure that the terms I wanted for folks to know and understand where listed in the guide. Thus, it wasn’t some random – “Hey, just add all the terms out there.”
- Understanding AI Tokens – When I was in Amsterdam at an AI conference many years ago, I was shocked that at the sessions I attended, including the keynote – nobody mentioned nor talked about token fees. Thankfully, I brought it up with a question – which in turn had people afterwards talking to me about AI and cost expenditures. I again, asked and made sure that the topics of interest, were included. Crucial, crucial items.
- Prompting without burning your budget – This is something near and dear to me, when discussing prompting, which anyone who has read previous posts, I bring up and talk about how to save costs, what you should do when it comes to prompting. This guide does an exceptional job and prompting techniques, including the BIG THREE you should always know.
- Prompting Hacks Guide – This isn’t illegal nor unethical hacks, rather they are ones that again, will help you. A nice add-on to the other Prompting guide.
- Claude Training Workbook – Perfect for anyone who is using Claude. Again, there were specific items I wanted to make sure was in the guide, especially the “deep thinking” questions. Just the other day, I was talking to an HR executive who told me, that people in interviews, appeared as Avatars (the software did this) and when the recruiter asked them a question, it was clear to the recruiter that the person was using AI. I told them the way to break that, was to ask the applicant – deep thinking questions. Why? AI can’t do deep thinking, at the present time. And this is regardless of the LLM, commercial or open source. Or the software for that matter. The training workbook can easily apply to other LLMs you might be using when it comes to the deep thinking.
- Claude Entry Guide – If you are new to Claude this guide will be of great help, because it includes terms I rarely see in other LinkedIn posts – artifacts.
- Claude Power Guide – If you past Entry, but not yet, full-blown expert, this will be of use to you.
- Beat the Resume Bots – A lot of people get pushed out of the application process because the software the company is using is AI. This guide teaches you how to get your resume to a real human and not be removed because of AI.
One item I want to bring it that is really important is how “chat” works with any LLM.
And this includes you chatting with the AI assistant in your learning system.
When you continue to chat with the assistant, following up with questions and so forth, yes, it is a wonderful plus, however, the AI remembers this information and “learns” from it, but in the background.
It is a double-edge sword, because the only way to stop this from happening is to create a new “chat”.
I often hear this inquiry on the chat angle, which again, vendors fail to note but is really relevant.
Bottom Line
The guides are available today – and above you will see direct links to them.
I am working on creating a grid with previews of the guides, viewing and downloading right within the site. Today though, it is direct links. Simply click on the title of the guide and you will go to a site to view and download.
I will continue to create new guides, as warranted – with one in the works around creating content, with my information going directly into the prompt and then some secret sauce tossed in for what I want as an output.
Sure, I could tell you the secret sauce, but then
I would have to tell you how to change lead into Gold.
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