A hands-on tour of AI assistants
Five kinds of AI tools, each as a working imitation you can drive. Start with chat. End with a small thing you built. No prior experience required.
Chat for ideas.
Draft, plan, summarise, brainstorm.
Plan a 3-day Tokyo trip
Day 1 · Shibuya. Day 2 · Asakusa…
Code in your terminal.
A coding CLI that lives where your code does.
$ claude code▌
UI from a sentence.
Describe it; ship a page.
Cloud agents, in parallel.
Many tasks at once, in the background.
Run your own agent.
Open-source. On your machine. No subscription.
$ hermes serve▌
tools · plan · act · observe
Start Here
What modern AI assistants are, and what you can build with them. 0 / 2
Foundations
What every AI tutorial assumes you know — prompt, CLI, git, safety. 0 / 4
5 min ✓
Writing prompts that work
The shape of a good prompt. Iterate; don't restart. The one skill that compounds.
4 min ✓
The CLI / terminal
A text window where you tell your computer what to do. Where most AI tools live.
4 min ✓
Git — your AI safety net
Version control as 'undo for your whole project'. Essential when AI edits files.
5 min ✓
Hallucinations, leaks, and what AI can't do
The five failure modes every AI user should know — and how to defend against them.
Chat assistants
ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini, Perplexity, Mistral Le Chat. 0 / 3
3 min ✓
Drive a chat assistant
ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini all share this shape. Try the imitation.
3 min ✓
Projects, GPTs, Gems — custom assistants
Drop in files + instructions to make a focused helper for one job.
3 min ✓
Artifacts and canvases
When the assistant produces a thing it pops into a side panel.
Coding assistants
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Antigravity, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot. 0 / 4
4 min ✓
What coding assistants do
An AI pair programmer that reads, edits, and runs your code.
4 min ✓
Install and first run
Most CLIs follow the same install pattern.
4 min ✓
Slash commands, agents, skills
Drive a pretend coding-CLI session.
5 min ✓
Skills — recipes your assistant loads on demand
A folder of markdown that teaches your CLI a procedure. Auto-triggered by description, model-loaded as needed.
Visual UI generators
v0.dev, Lovable, Bolt, Claude Design, Galileo. 0 / 2
Going deeper
MCP, cost, multimodal, RAG, evals — theory you'll want once you've used the tools. 0 / 5
4 min ✓
MCP — how AI plugs into your tools
The standard that lets agents talk to your filesystem, Slack, GitHub, Postgres, etc.
5 min ✓
Tokens, models, and what it actually costs
How AI is priced, where your money goes, and how to cap your spend before it surprises you.
5 min ✓
Multimodal — images, voice, screen
Modern assistants take more than text. What to feed them, what to ask for, and which tool for which medium.
6 min ✓
RAG — giving AI access to your data
How retrieval-augmented generation works, when to use it, and the simpler alternatives most people overlook.
5 min ✓
Evals — knowing your AI actually works
How to test AI output beyond 'looks fine to me'. The boring practice that separates hobby from production.
Cloud agents (parallel)
Devin, Claude Cowork, Copilot Workspace, Codex Cloud. 0 / 2
Open-source autonomous agents
Hermes, OpenClaw, nanoclaw, aider, OpenHands — agents you self-host. 0 / 3
4 min ✓
The open-source agent ecosystem
Hermes, OpenClaw, nanoclaw, aider, OpenHands, Goose, Continue, Cline.
4 min ✓
LLM APIs in 4 minutes
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — same shape, three vendors.
6 min ✓
Set up an autonomous agent (worked example)
Hermes Agent install — pattern transfers to most others.
Ship Something
Pick one. Build it. Keep it. 0 / 6
2 min ✓
Pick what to build
Five guided paths. Pick one and follow it end-to-end in the real tool.
10 min ✓
Build · A writing assistant
A saved Project / GPT / Gem you'll use forever. ~10 min, no install.
15 min ✓
Build · A live webpage
A working one-page site you can share. ~15 min, no install.
20 min ✓
Build · A personal script
A Python tool on your machine via a coding CLI. ~20 min.
25 min ✓
Build · A Slack channel digest bot
A bot that posts a daily summary to a Slack channel. Real API tokens, real scheduling. ~25 min.
30 min ✓
Build · A scheduled watcher
A Claude Cowork agent that scans a feed on a schedule and pings you when something matters. ~30 min.