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New to using AI for your coursework? This is the place to begin. You do not need any setup or experience. In about ten minutes you will know how to use AI to actually learn, and how to avoid the trap most people fall into.

What AI is good and bad for

AI tools (such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) are good study partners and poor substitutes for thinking. They can explain a confusing idea, give you a hint when you are stuck, suggest a different way to look at a problem, quiz you, and point out a weak spot in your draft. They are fast, patient, and available at 2 a.m.

They are also confidently wrong sometimes, they will happily do your work for you if you ask, and they do not know what you already understand unless you tell them. The biggest mistake is to let the AI do the work instead of helping you do it. When that happens you get a finished assignment and learn almost nothing, because the part that teaches you is the part the AI just did for you.

So the goal is simple: use AI to help you learn, not to replace the learning.

The one rule

If you remember nothing else, remember this: try to solve.

Make your own attempt at a problem before you ask the AI for help, even a rough or wrong one. The attempt does two things. It gives your mind something to work with, so the AI’s help actually lands. And it tells you where you are stuck, so you can ask a useful question instead of “just do it.”

Asking AI before you have tried is the fast road to a finished assignment you cannot reproduce on the test. Trying first is the whole difference between using AI to learn and using it to skip learning.

Set it up once (ten minutes)

Out of the box, AI tools are tuned to be impressive: they over-explain, hand over answers, and talk to you at a generic level pitched at no one. You can fix this. Every major tool lets you save preferences that apply to every conversation.

Walk through the short setup in companion/dpp/. You will tell the AI who you are and what you are studying, ask it to pitch explanations to your level, ask it to flag things it is unsure about, and set a boundary that it should help you learn rather than do the work. Ten minutes here makes every later conversation better.

Keep a study partner

For a study session, paste the study-partner prompt in companion/spp/ at the start. It turns the AI into a partner that asks what you have tried, gives hints instead of answers, and checks your understanding, rather than an answer machine. It is the “try first, ask for help” habit, built into a prompt.

Your first session

Try this with your next assignment:

  1. Read the problem and make a real attempt on your own for a few minutes.
  2. Write down the exact spot where you got stuck.
  3. Open the AI, paste the study-partner prompt, and ask for one hint about your stuck spot, not the answer.
  4. Use the hint to keep going yourself.
  5. When you think you have it, close the AI and redo the key step from a blank page. If you can, you have learned it.

That is the whole loop. The book calls it the Learning Spiral, and everything else builds on it.

If you have already been using AI to get answers

If AI has mostly been an answer machine for you so far, that is a common place to start from, and there is a guide for making the switch: see students/from-answers-to-learning.md.

Next steps