Peter Niu
Learning in Public

AI for Normies

Interactive workshop to understand what AI tools actually do by building them.

Completed

AI for Normies · Session 0
AI Glossary
A running list of terms I encounter.
AI for Normies · Session 1
Agents 101 for Normies
An interactive, self-paced presentation that teaches non-technical people how AI agents actually work.
AI for Normies · Session 2
Reliable Business Workflows Through Skills
How a skill graduates from a paragraph you type into a folder you build.

Roadmap

Sessions 3–7 go under the hood to unpack the internal components that turn toys into productivity tools. Sessions 8–10 put them to use on real business problems.

  1. 3
    How I Built My AI's Memory
    Vector search, embeddings, entity graphs
    Up next
  2. 4
    How I Built a Searchable Research Library
    RAG done right — chunking, reranking, parent expansion
    Planned
  3. 5
    How I Give AI Custom Tools
    MCP authoring from scratch
    Planned
  4. 6
    How I Test Whether AI Matches My Judgment
    Evals as discipline — golden sets, scorer rubrics, F1
    Planned
  5. 7
    How I Watch What My AI Is Doing
    Observability — transcripts, tracing, dashboards
    Planned
  6. 8
    How I Generate Proposals You'd Actually Send
    Reliable, deterministic AI output for high-stakes business docs
    Planned
  7. 9
    How I Automate Sales Workflows
    CRM integration, lead scoring, outreach drafting
    Planned
  8. 10
    How I Draft Contracts You Can Trust
    Clause libraries, compliance checks, human-in-the-loop review
    Planned