1. Watch the intro video and introduce yourself in the intro post here 2. Start with The Foundation (free course). Concepts, folder architecture, prompting framework. Everything else builds on this. 3. Check in at the bottom of each lesson. Polls, discussion posts, other members working through the same stuff. Use them. 4. When you're ready to build real things, move to Implementation Playbooks (Level 2). When you're ready to build your own tools, Building Your Stack (Level 3). 5. Post your work. Ask questions. Help others when you can. What are you here to build?

Tell us three things: 1. What you do (job, industry, student, career-changer, whatever) 2. What brought you to Clief Notes 3. One thing you're trying to figure out right now related to computing or AI I'll respond to every single one. And read each other's intros too because the person who's stuck on the same problem as you might already be in this thread. I'll go first I am Jake, I have been working in tech for 15 Years, building with Generative AI for 3 Years straight now! Excited to teach and learn! That's it. Simple, scannable, gives you data on who's joining and what they need, and keeps the feed clear for content that retains people past week one.

Hey Everyone, Just wanted to share a small win for me today. I managed to secure my first sit down with a possible client today. I got talking to our contract manager at work today just general chit chat talking about his role and what it entailed. We got onto how late he has to work and how it was hard on the family so so forth. I said to him what if i could give you that time back through implementing software that did a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to office admin. he laughed and asked how was that I explained lv learned how to use AI to build systems we went back and forth a bit about AI talking about where it might lead and such and I'm not going to lie basically regurgitated Jakes classes stating things like how its now to have a hand carved rifle will set you back a small fortune but way back when you would of been looked down on, I spoke about the part about human desire and how that will always be there. He was completely taken back to him I was now not just a vet and a carpenter I was the future and Iv been asked to come to the office tomorrow to sit down and talk. I know its only a sit down and nothing confirmed but when i first approached them i was basically laughed out the office and given work via what's app but that small amount of knowledge might be the reason my life changes for the better. So thank you @Jake Van Clief .for giving this course away and helping complete beginners like me a fighter chance of a better future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETvz1qhQDXE

I wanted proof that my prompts improved from four months ago. The results turned into this post. Around early January I added these instructions to my Claude.ai user preferences: If required information is missing, ask clarifying questions before answering. Before giving the final answer: list assumptions, identify missing data, state confidence level. If appropriate, advise on how to write a prompt more efficiently in the future. Then I had Claude pull my chat history from before and after, and look for patterns. I figured I'd see changes in what I was asking. The actual change was in how I structured conversations around the asking, in three phases. Phase 1: one-line prompts (early January) Real prompt from January 8: "How do I set up a eSIM on a Windows laptop?" I was asking the way you'd ask a search engine. Claude wrote a generic eSIM tutorial. I bounced because it didn't match my situation, and never came back. That was my default. One sentence prompts. No context, no constraint, no goal. Phase 2: Claude starts showing its work (mid-January) This is where the instructions started doing actual work. The "list assumptions" line forced Claude to write down what it was filling in for me. When a response opened with "Assuming this is a Windows endpoint with standard user permissions and no recent OS reimage," I could correct the wrong guesses before they corrupted the rest of the answer. About half the time, at least one was wrong. "Identify missing data" produced a list of the questions Claude wanted to ask but was about to silently guess at. Reading that list every response taught me what to include upfront. Every "missing data" bullet was a future prompt fix. "State confidence" forced Claude to mark which parts of the answer were solid and which to stress-test. "High confidence that one of the first three checks will identify the cause" is useful in a way that a confident-sounding wall of text just isn't. The prompt-efficiency line pulled the other three together into a habit. After enough rounds of "next time include the OS version and whether the machine is domain-managed," I stopped needing to be told.