Guides
Plain guides for running AI in a business. Open to read, nothing to sign up for.
Anas Siddiqui @anas.helloworld
New guides start as reels. Follow so you catch the next one.
23 guides
- Tools
"Act as an expert" was tested on 162 roles. What to write instead
A 2024 study tested 162 roles on nine open AI models and 2,410 exam questions. Adding a role did not make answers more accurate. This guide covers what the study found and its limits, the three things we add instead, each with a before and after, and when a role still helps.
5 min readRead - Tools
Build a working AI agent in Python: one model, two tools, one loop
Most AI agents are a model calling tools in a loop. This is a complete one in about 120 lines of Python: Claude, a calculator, a file reader and two stop conditions, with what each part does and what has to go around the loop before you trust it.
5 min readRead - Getting started
ChatGPT has never read a single word. How tokens work
ChatGPT reads tokens: small chunks of words, each turned into a number. This guide shows what that means, how to see the tokens yourself on OpenAI's tokenizer page or with five lines of Python, and why it matters for cost, context limits, spelling quirks and Hindi.
6 min readRead - Getting started
Five red flags in an AI course, and the free path we would take instead
Before you pay for an AI course, check it for five red flags, and know what a good course shows instead. Then the free path we would take, in order: Python, fast.ai, Karpathy's Zero to Hero and the Hugging Face LLM course, with what each expects and what you build.
7 min readRead - Tools
Four codes that make ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini teach you anything
Type one short code before your question and the same chatbot answers like a tutor: ELI5 to understand it, 80/20 to know what matters, Mind map to see how it fits, Quiz me to make it stick. We tested all four in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini on 18 October 2026.
3 min readRead - Getting started
Learn AI engineering from zero: the build-first roadmap
The order we would learn AI engineering in if we started today, built around projects rather than certificates. Six stages from Python to shipping your own AI app, with the free course for each, the project that proves you learned it, how long it takes and how to know you are ready.
21 min readRead - Getting started
Six things we never do as AI engineers, and what we do instead
The full list behind the reel: six things we never do when we build with AI, from trusting AI scoreboards to leaving passwords in code. For each one, why it hurts, what we do instead, and the code or setting to copy.
10 min readRead - Tools
Stop losing your saved Instagram reels: two fixes
Saved reels pile up and rarely get watched. Two free fixes: share new reels to Recall, which transcribes them so you can search them later, and turn your old saved list into a sorted watch list with one Claude prompt.
4 min readRead - Tools
Train your own AI for $0, $48 or $5.6 million: what each one gets you
What three real prices buy you when you train your own AI. Free: teach an existing AI your examples on a chip Google lends you. $48: build a small AI from zero. $5.6 million: one big training run at DeepSeek. The steps, the time, and what each one cannot do.
9 min readRead - Tools
Free AI on your phone with no internet: PocketPal and the model that fits
PocketPal is a free, open-source app that runs a small AI model on your phone, with no account and no internet once the model is downloaded. Here is the install, which Gemma or Qwen model to pick for a phone with about 4, 6 or 8 GB of RAM, the airplane-mode test and three prompts.
10 min readRead - Tools
This week in AI, 13 to 17 October 2026: five releases and how to try them
Claude traced the origin of the NIST curve seeds, Gemini 4 Argon reached the Gemini app, Meta released the weights for Muse Spark Open, Krea 3 edits a photo in under eight seconds, and Gemini now runs tasks while you are away. What each one is, who can use it, what it costs and where to start.
6 min readRead - Tools
Turn an Excel sheet into a clickable dashboard with Claude, on the free plan
Claude's free plan can read a spreadsheet and build a dashboard you can click: three KPI cards, a trend chart, a breakdown and working filters. Here is the exact prompt, three follow-ups (by region, add last month, make it presentation-ready) and how to show it in a meeting.
8 min readRead - Tools
Five prompts for slides that don't look AI‑made, in Claude Design
Claude Design, Slides and Docs are now on every Claude plan, including Free. The tool is not the reason AI decks look alike; the prompt is. These are the five prompts we use, in order: the brief, the style lock, the filler cut, the number slide and the tough reviewer.
4 min readRead - Tools
Edit a reel with Claude: raw clip in, storyboard first, one sentence per fix
The reel you came from was never opened in an editing app. Claude wrote it as code and rendered it to video. Here is our whole workflow: setup, footage, the first message, captions, the storyboard review, the notes that work, sound, checks, rendering and posting.
10 min readRead - Tools
Run Google's Gemma 4 on your own laptop with Ollama
Gemma 4 is Google DeepMind's family of open models, and the small versions run on a laptop. Ollama, a free open-source app, runs it with one command. Here is the install, which size to pick, the commands worth knowing, images, memory, and how your code can call it.
9 min readRead - Tools
Build your own LLM from scratch: a three-step map
Training a model of GPT-2's ability cost about $43,000 in 2019. One open repository now does it for about $48 of rented GPU time. This is the order to learn it in: one lecture, one book's worth of code, one training run.
5 min readRead - Tools
Rehearse your launch on test customers with MiroFish
MiroFish is an open-source simulation engine with about 79,000 stars on GitHub. Give it your landing page, your pricing or your ad, ask one question, and it builds a crowd of simulated customers who react, talk it over and answer your follow-up questions.
3 min readRead - Tools
Practise for an interview with ChatGPT's Study mode
A study of nearly a thousand students found that practising with ordinary ChatGPT left them 17% worse once it was taken away. This is the setting that changes how it helps, and the prompts to use it for an interview.
3 min readRead - Tools
Check if a photo is AI with Google's SynthID Detector
Google opened its SynthID Detector to everyone on 7 October 2026. This is how to run a photo, video or audio file through it, how to read each result, and what it cannot catch.
3 min readRead - Operations
A person in the loop
Designing the approval step: what a reviewer should see, how confidence should be shown, when the system should stop and ask, and how to keep the audit trail useful.
6 min readRead - Testing
Shadow mode before launch
How to test a system on your own files before it goes live: a locked test set, a threshold agreed in advance, shadow mode beside the team, an assisted launch, and when to automate a category.
6 min readRead - Data
Ask for a data map
Before anyone touches client information, ask for one document: every step, where it is processed, how long it is kept and who can see it. The questions to put to any vendor.
5 min readRead - Getting started
How to choose the first workflow
Look for work that arrives in one channel, follows a rule and ends in a record. Leave the rest alone for now. A one-page worksheet to fill before any call.
5 min readRead
Reading is free. So is the call.
Bring the workflow you have in mind. Fifteen minutes is enough to tell whether a system fits it, and if it does not, we say so.