Reading · The Open Augments Field Guide

Over the past six months, I've been teaching teams at places like Stanford, Penn, Northwestern, and many more how to start using AI responsibly and effectively in their work. Today, I'm starting to release my entire curriculum: for free, forever, for everyone!

I'm calling it the

Open Augments AI Academy. It's built for anyone out there who's seen all the crazy hype and discourse around modern AI and is just looking for a guided, grounded, and sane way to move forward learning how to approach these tools for themselves. As someone who's been using these tools and their predecessors for my research since ~2019, I'm trying to provide everyone the intuition and critical awareness they need to get started at this very confusing and pivotal time (my north-star audience is my mom and dad!).

The first lesson starts with one foundational idea that most people miss when they get started with AI: that modern AI is much less like a hyper-intelligent database or brain, and much more like autocomplete with an extremely fancy hat on. That's its single greatest flaw

AND its single greatest strength, at the same time. When you really understand what's happening under the hood and how it works (no math or stats required!) a lot of confusing AI behavior suddenly clicks: why it hallucinates, why it's sometimes confidently wrong, and why it can now do way, WAY more than just write words on a page. From there, we're going to learn about all the crazy buzzwords (context engineering, harness engineering, and Agents, oh my!) and advanced techniques, with much more to come!

No jargon, no experience required, and all taught with the care of a former high school English teacher so that you, your coworkers, your friends, and your mom can follow along. I pair these videos with hands-on demos and interactive activities in the

Context Gym: my way of giving you a safe and guided place to practice some of the core principles that should deepen your intuition as we go.

If any of this strikes a chord with you, the full 10min course overview and the first lesson (16min) are live right now on the Open Augments AI Academy page. Start there, and if you find it helpful, please do subscribe here to get email updates on new course videos via Substack below, or on YouTube, and share with friends as I release lessons weekly! It’s a really wild time, and this is my best shot at trying to help others navigate things more capably as the tech shifts and grows rapidly from here.

Introducing: the Open Augments AI Academy! A free course on responsible AI for everyone

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