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Week / Day 1 · Wed Aug 5 / AI Foundations
Studio · taught

AI Foundations

What a model actually is, where it lies, and how to drive an LLM like a pro.

Open this session's deck →
9:20
start
70m
duration
2
exercises
3
things you leave with
Welcome

Before you build anything: two crash courses in one. What a startup is, and what AI is. By the end of this session you will have had your first real working conversation with an LLM, and you will understand why the next four days are possible at all.

You walk out with
✓A working mental model of AI
✓The anatomy of a strong prompt
✓One prompt that does real work for you
Why this session exists

Every tool you touch this week is driven by one skill: telling an AI precisely what you want. Seventy minutes here saves you hours of frustration every day after.

The arc, minute by minute
9:20
What a model is, what it is good at, where it lies
9:35
Prompt anatomy: context, instruction, format, iterate
9:50
Prompt battle: same task, weak vs strong prompt, live
10:10
Wow demo: a 30-second Suno song about this cohort, generated live
10:15
How you will use this every single day this week
Exercises
01
Prompt battle
Everyone runs the same task twice: the lazy one-line prompt, then the strong one with context, constraints and format. Watch the difference on screen.
02
One useful prompt
Ship one prompt that does real work for you personally. That prompt is yours forever.
prompt · give this to the room verbatim
You are helping me learn to prompt well. I will give you a task. First give me the mediocre one-line prompt most people would write, then the strong version with context, constraints and output format, then explain the difference in two sentences. Task: [X].
Tools in play
Claude
Materials to prep
ProjectorClaude open on every laptop
The checkpoint · nothing counts unless it is live
You can name the four parts of a strong prompt and you have used them.
next →Brainstorming problems