Generative AI: From Beginner to Confident

Points clés

• Confidence with generative AI climbs four rungs, asker, editor, builder and guide, and each rung has a visible sign that you have reached it.
• An asker practises by typing one clear sentence a day and reading the whole answer; the rung is done when results stop surprising you.
• An editor reads every output with a red pen, predicts what will be wrong before reading, and gives the tool corrections instead of restarting.
• A builder joins small prompts into a repeatable chain for a whole job, keeps a written recipe, and can hand it to someone else.
• Keep a practice log with a one-to-five score per session; a plateau means change the drill, not the tool, and never skip a rung.

À l'intérieur de ce bit

1. The ladder at a glance

   Confidence with these tools comes from climbing, and the climb has recognisable rungs. Rung one is the asker, who can type a clear request and get something usable back.

2. Rung one: the asker

   An asker knows that the tool answers the question actually typed, not the one in their head, so they type the whole question. The drill is small: once a day, one request in a single clear sentence that names the task, the reader and the length.

3. Rung two: the editor

   An asker accepts good-enough output; an editor reads it the way a teacher reads homework. The drill is the red pen: before reading an answer, write down the two things most likely to be wrong, then read and mark every error, weak line and made-up detail.

4. Rung three: the builder

   A builder stops treating each request as a fresh conversation and starts assembling a routine. Take a whole job, such as turning a client's messy receipts into a monthly summary, and break it into steps: sort the items, draft the summary, check the totals, write the covering note.

5. Rung four: the guide

   A guide can do everything below this rung and one thing more: explain it to someone who cannot, and say clearly when the tool is the wrong choice. The drill is to teach one person one routine, then watch them use it without you and note where they stumble.

6. Deliberate practice and what to do on a plateau

   Climbing happens on purpose. Keep a practice log: date, the drill you did, and a score from one to five for how close the result was to what you needed.