Before I Built Anything, I Was a Tourist

Before I built anything, I was a tourist.

I dipped into Gemini through Google Search. Typed a question. Got an answer. Moved on. I did the same with ChatGPT. Signed up for the free version, used it a few times, decided it was a slightly more conversational search engine, and stopped.

I was not wrong about what I was doing with it. I was wrong about what it was capable of.

A few months later I was hearing a lot about Claude. Not from developers. From people I work alongside commercially. The noise was specific enough that I paid attention.

Around the same time, a colleague came to me and said he did not understand what everyone was talking about. What was Claude, what was the point, why did it matter.

I told him Anthropic had just made their learning platform free. Anthropic Academy. Go through it, see what you think.

About a month later he showed the team a dashboard he had built. Nothing spectacular. But it shifted how we worked. He had gone from not understanding the conversation to producing something functional, in four weeks, with no technical background.

I had been the one handing out the directions.

I had not been anywhere near the destination.

So I created an account.

What happened in that first session was not what I expected. More on that next week.

Where did you start with AI? A lot of people I speak to describe exactly the same search engine phase. Most of them moved on too quickly.

If you want to explore it yourself, both are free to start:

Anthropic's learning platform: anthropic.com/learn

Claude: claude.ai