Welcome

This course starts with one line: “Answer staff questions about the procedures manual”. It is the first attempt of someone who has to prepare the assistant for a mutual insurance society, and the answer it produces sounds good and is useless. Over four blocks you will turn that line into complete instructions, test them with cases, decide which documents the assistant sees and demand citations that can be opened. Choose now a task from your own work that involves no personal or confidential data, because you will do with it the same as with the case, and have your AI assistant at hand: here you practise with it, and you check it.

What you will find

• Block 1. Instructions that work. From the loose question to the complete brief: what you want it for, what information and what means the assistant has, what it must not do and how you will know it is finished. First piece of the case: the mutual's assistant instructions, from one line to five parts.
• Block 2. Examples, steps and iteration. Teaching with examples without the assistant copying their quirks, splitting a large brief into steps that can be reviewed, and improving instructions without fooling yourself: tuning them by looking at a single case is learning the exam by heart. Second piece of the case: the mutual assistant's three test cases.
• Block 3. Context: give it what it needs and nothing more. What is put in front of a language model, with what labels and in what order, what is left out even if it does not concern people, and how to work with a long document without mistaking a summary for a reading. Third piece of the case: which part of the manual the mutual's assistant sees.
• Block 4. Answering with sources: an assistant with your documents. How an assistant that searches a document base before answering responds, what can fail when chopping up, searching and drafting, and how to demand a citation that can be checked. Last piece of the case: the rule for accepting an answer as good and who maintains the manual.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each block ends with an exam of six questions. All the answers come with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.