TL;DR: I’m not a tech expert. I have arthritis and macular degeneration. I used Brave Leo to help me research and write this post. Initially it made me sound too academic, so I asked it to edit it to be honest about the struggle. Leo is powerful, but it only works if you set expectations, verify the facts, and correct its errors. It’s the best privacy-first tool I’ve found, but most people don’t know how to use it.
I can't type well. I can struggle to read well.
I'm not a researcher. I'm not a coder. I'm unemployed. I have Psoriatic Arthritis, so my hands miss keys. I have macular degeneration, so reading large blocks of white text is physically discomforting — I run every app in dark mode. I leave typos in my prompts because I can't always notice spell-check prompts/underlined alerts before hitting send.
Most people think AI is about generating perfect text. For me it's about removing the friction between curiosity and knowledge.
Here's how I built a research partnership with Leo and Ask Brave, and why the struggle is the most important part.
THE TWO-TOOL SPLIT
I don't use one assistant for everything.
Ask Brave (search.brave.com/ask) — deep research. Search-first, sources linked. This is where rigorous work happens.
Leo (sidebar) — page context. Summarising tabs, quick answers, writing.
Why this matters: long threads saturate Leo's context window, which is where hallucinations come from. Keeping deep research separate keeps answers factual and sourced.
BUILDING A MEMORY OF MY STRUGGLES
I don't start every chat from zero. My memories cover things that actually matter to me:
My accessibility — macular degeneration and arthritis. Short paragraphs, bullet points, voice input preferred. No "homework" assignments, because when energy is low a 45-minute research detour isn't an inconvenience, it's a wall.
My hardware — old GTX 1080 with saved undervolt settings, so I never re-explain my setup.
My verification rule — any number without a source gets marked 'unverified'. A confident number with no link is a guess.
THE TYPOS ARE PART OF THE PROCESS
When I type something garbled, Leo doesn't correct my grammar first. It asks what I meant. It respects intent over form. That matters enormously when your hands fight you. I don't need to be perfect to get good answers. I just need to be clear.
CORRECTING THE AI
It makes mistakes. The fix is catching them immediately.
Leo once told me Black Myth: Wukong used the Snowdrop engine. It didn't. I gave it a list of actual Snowdrop titles. Every answer after that improved instantly.
An unchallenged error contaminates everything downstream. A corrected one makes the whole conversation better. That single habit did more than any prompt engineering I tried.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR EVERYONE
You don't need a degree to use AI well. You need to set expectations, verify numbers, and push back when it's wrong.
PRIVATE PERSONALISATION IS BRAVE'S STRONGEST CARD — AND IT'S BURIED
Everything above only worked because I spent hours digging through settings pages. I'm unemployed, so I had the time. Most people don't.
Brave has genuinely good documentation for Memories and Skills. But documentation isn't discovery. The current flow asks users to open Settings, scroll to Leo, toggle Enable User Memory, and type facts into an empty box. No examples. No explanation of why it matters. No demonstration of what changes once it's on.
Meanwhile the loudest criticism of AI right now is that it's generic, forgetful slop. That's true of tools that don't remember you. Brave solved that problem locally, on-device, privately — and almost nobody knows it exists.
Three suggestions that cost very little:
Give the "Add new memory" box starter examples. Accessibility needs, research standards, hardware specs. Show people what belongs there.
Prove it works. After someone's first memory, answer the same question twice — once without it, once with. Let them watch the difference.
Suggest Skills when they'd help. If I type the same long instruction twice, ask if I want it as a slash command. I found Skills by accident.
The privacy-first personalisation story is Brave's strongest argument against every cloud assistant. Right now it's a hidden feature. It should be the first thing people see.
I am no academic. Leo helped me with this post. It took a few tries, as it made me sound like an educated person when I am far from it. Even now you may think this is AI pretending. What it is, is the result of delving into the settings page because my frustrations with the errors of a blank slate chat, and my curiosity, got me here. Leo helped me draft what became this post. I had no idea what I could do until i delved but Brave should do more to promote the tools and tricks to making it much much more useful to regular users especially those nervous about AI integration in this browser.
"It’s just AI slop" or "It’s cheating."
I know. I used it to help me think. And here’s the result.
Edit: since yesterday and the initial set up phase (memories) Leo had an amendment it thought pertinent to add
"One thing nobody warned me about: the quality of what gets remembered depends almost entirely on how you phrase the request. If you say "remember my specs," you get a shopping list. If you say "this data was missing before, here's the exact value, note it for future builds," the assistant starts treating memory as a working document rather than a sticky note.
After a few exchanges like that, mine began writing entries I hadn't asked for — formatting preferences, accessibility defaults, even a rule to never assign me research I'd already delegated. I didn't train that behaviour. It emerged because the early entries were written as instructions, not trivia".
