AI Crash Course

Welcome to the AI Crash Course.

This course teaches you how to use AI more effectively as a programmer. It is about how to think about AI and how to use it well.

To become genuinely good with AI tools, you need to understand how models work, what kinds of models exist, and which usage patterns make them more effective.

Let me use an analogy. Imagine you need to get across town. You have several transportation options:

You can walk. It is free, but it takes longer.
You can ride a bike. It costs a little and is a little faster.
You can drive a car. It costs the most and is the fastest.

Now, I know what you are thinking. Let us ignore public transport for a moment. I like this example because you get to choose between time, money, reliability, and effort.

Similarly, imagine you want to build a software product. There are also many ways to do it:

You can write every line of code without assistance. This is usually free (iOS developers need a subscription to publish apps), but it can take longer and is more error-prone.
You can use an IDE or other developer tooling. This can cost money, but it helps you move faster by giving feedback on the code you write.
You can use AI tooling. This is more expensive, but with practice and effort it can help you build software faster.

I like this analogy because you stay in control. Millions of developers are curious about how AI can help them become more productive, but they want to understand the tools better before spending money on them.

Working with AI is a new kind of programming. In the simplest case, you no longer need to search Google or dig through documentation sites to find what you need. AI can also help complete code intelligently, or generate entire files from your instructions and the code that already exists.

But if you do not have a good mental model for how AI works and where its limits are, using AI can become frustrating. AI generates code for you, but it does not work. Then you ask it to fix the code, and it still does not work. Ouch.

This course will help you understand the fundamentals, while showing practical patterns for building software with AI models and tools.

All right, let us begin.

This Crash Course is adapted from cursor.com/learn.