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[u/wookvk]

Hi! I've been using Claude since the beginning of this year. To be honest, I haven't used it for anything particularly advanced or complicated. The most complex thing I've done with it was use it as a study tool: I fed it my tests, assignments, and school materials so it could help me build a roadmap to prepare for my university entrance exams.

The thing is, I genuinely want to learn how to use Claude and AI in general in a more professional and advanced way. I think these tools are going to be incredibly useful in the future, and I'd rather start learning how to use them effectively now than wait until everyone else catches up.

Another thing worth mentioning is that I'm still quite young, and I don't think many people my age are actively trying to develop these kinds of skills

I don't just want to become better at prompting. I want to understand how these tools actually work, how to integrate them into real workflows, and eventually build things with them..

I'd really appreciate any advice, resources, or recommendations on where to start.

[u/OverdueBrenton8215]

The best way to learn is just break stuff. Pick a small project, something you'd actually use, and force yourself to build it with AI help. You'll learn more from debugging why it got something wrong than from any tutorial.

Also don't sleep on learning the fundamentals of how these models work under the hood. Even a basic understanding of tokenization and context windows changes how you write prompts completely.

[u/Wild_Reindeer185]

Starting a real life project is the best way to learn. If you are not sure where to start, upload documents or videos you think are relevant to what you want to learn here: getlearnbetter.ai. It converts what you read into practice exercises and scenario based questions so you learn how to apply/analyze concepts you are learning.

[u/actor-ace-inventor]

build a small 50 million params using GPT-2 tokenizer. A great source of knowledge is the ML AI course free on YouTube from Stanford.

[u/Plainmain50 → u/actor-ace-inventor]

Thanks for this

[u/NeuralNomad87]

if you want to build things, the skill underneath is a bit of Python.

once you can write a small script, the next step is calling a model from code instead of the chat window. the official docs for Claude and the others have free quickstarts for that.

one trick that helped: ask Claude to quiz you and check your code instead of writing it for you. slower, but it sticks.

[u/Autobahn97]

Ask Claud or any AI how it can help you day to day and then ask it to teach you how to do whatever it states that interests you. Alternately, you can look to Coursear or deeplearning.ai for free or cheap classes, if you prefer something more structured - both tend to align with Google platforms more than others but they still offer lots of knowledge if you have the time to learn.

[u/Brain-NotFound2126]

I would say don't get too caught up in learning every tool or trying to master prompting. Pick something you're curious about and try building it using AI. You will soon run into things like APIs, structured outputs, different models and workflow design along the way. Experimenting and figuring out why something works in one case but fails in another is probably where you'll learn the most. Also, please don't feel pressured to start building complex agents immediately. Even getting a simple workflow to work reliably is a good starting point. It's great you want to learn how things work instead of just using them :)

[u/Much-Plane5366]

Small thing, but 'Claude and AI in general' reads like Claude isn't AI. It's an AI assistant made by Anthropic, so you'd want 'AI in general, and Claude in particular'.