Category
AI for Mere Mortals.
AI explained for the rest of us — practical, plain English, no jargon.
55 posts in AI for Mere Mortals
Skills vs Rules vs Commands: Which AI Tool When?
Claude Code gives you three ways to teach the agent something. They overlap. Picking the wrong one turns clean instructions into prompt soup.
Claude Code Workflows: What Works, What Wastes Time
A year in, the gap between people who get serious work done with Claude Code and people who fight it traces to a small set of habits.
MCP Servers: Why Most Fail And What Works
A year after MCP shipped, most servers disappoint. The protocol works. The server you point your AI at probably doesn't. Here's why.
What Is Pass@k? Why AI Benchmarks Mislead Users
Pass@k is the metric AI labs use to make code-writing AIs look great. Here's why the score you see is more forgiving than you'll ever be.
artificial intelligence
AI for Mere Mortals Part 1: What Is AI, Actually?
AI is everywhere - but what actually is it? A plain-English explanation of what artificial intelligence is, what it isn't, and why it matters now.
AI
AI for Mere Mortals Part 4: How to Spot AI Content
An honest, jargon-free guide to spotting AI-generated text, images and video - plus why most 'AI detector' tools don't actually work.
AI
How to Use AI to Learn Anything Faster (A Beginner's Guide)
Five concrete techniques for using ChatGPT as a personal tutor - Feynman explanations, ELI5 mode, study plans, self-quizzing and summaries.
ai
How to Use AI for Meal Planning, Budgeting and Daily Tasks
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini aren't just for essays. How to use AI for meal plans, budgets, awkward emails, travel and home admin - with prompts to copy.
chatgpt
20 Actually Useful Things to Ask ChatGPT (Beyond Essays)
ChatGPT can do far more than write essays. 20 practical, everyday uses - from energy bills to holiday planning - with the exact prompts to copy.
claude-code
Why Claude Code Works Better When You Delegate
Treating Claude Code as a delegated engineer changes how you brief tasks, batch questions and use auto mode. Here's the practical difference.
claude
Claude Opus 4.7: What Changed, and Should You Care?
Anthropic's new Claude Opus 4.7 retook the top of the LLM benchmarks. Here's what actually changed for coders and what it means for a UK budget.
ai
Context Rot: Why Long AI Sessions Get Worse, Not Better
Long ChatGPT and Claude Code sessions quietly degrade as the conversation grows - here is why, what real engineering teams do, and your fix.
AI
Local AI Image Generators: A Beginner's Guide for 2026
Run a local AI image generator on your own computer - no cloud, no subscriptions. The best beginner-friendly options for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Agent-Assisted PRs: How MLX-LM Gets New Models Faster
What agent-assisted PRs for mlx-lm mean for UK Mac users: faster new-model support in Ollama, LM Studio, and the wider Apple Silicon ML ecosystem.
llms-txt
How to Make Your Pricing Page Readable by AI Agents
AI agents are starting to compare SaaS pricing for their users. Buffer's new machine-readable /pricing.md file shows where the web is heading.
Airflow vs LangGraph vs Temporal for AI Agents
Production AI agent orchestration in 2026: Airflow 3's agentic-workflow support and how LangGraph and Temporal differ. UK-friendly landscape view.
What biases AI shopping agents to pick your products?
Yale and Columbia researchers ran AI shopping agents through thousands of buying scenarios. The biases they found are stranger than you'd expect.
ai-coding
Why Your AI Coding Tool Feels Different Week to Week
Your AI coding assistant didn't get worse overnight. Six hidden levers can change how it behaves while the underlying model stays the same.
Why 'price per million tokens' lies about your AI bill
The sticker price on AI APIs hides a sneaky multiplier. Here's how tokenizer efficiency quietly inflates real bills, and how to compare like for like.
ai-coding
Windsurf 2.0: What the Agent Command Center Means
Windsurf 2.0 introduces a control panel for juggling local and cloud coding agents. Most features are paid; the design tells you what's coming.
Cloudflare's Agent Readiness Score Explained
Cloudflare's isitagentready.com scores sites across 4 dimensions for AI-agent compatibility. What each checks and the small-site fixes that matter.
AI safety
Is AI Safe? An Honest, Non-Scary Guide for Beginners
Worried AI might steal your data, your job, or take over the world? An honest guide to which AI risks are real, which are overhyped, and how to stay safe.
chatgpt
ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: Which AI Should You Use?
Three big AI chatbots, three free tiers, lots of hype. What each one is genuinely best at, where they fall short, and how to pick - without paying.
10 ChatGPT Prompts to Run Your Smart Home Smarter (2026)
10 ChatGPT prompts that make a smart home easier to run: morning briefings, YAML debugging, automation rules, colour-temp picks, product comparisons.
AI for Mere Mortals
AI for Mere Mortals Part 3: How to Write Better Prompts
Why your AI answers feel generic and how to fix them. Four ingredients of a good prompt, iteration patterns that work, and the common mistakes to avoid.
ai
Why Your AI Keeps Forgetting Things
AI memory looks like database lookup but it isn't. The five failure modes - decay, contradiction, confidence - that make AI forget what you told it.
ai
Why ChatGPT Cites Your Page (or Doesn't): 1.4M Prompts
An Ahrefs analysis of 1.4M ChatGPT prompts shows what actually wins citations - and why Reddit's huge presence rarely earns credit.
ai-coding
Why AI Coding Tools Struggle with Frontend Work
AI assistants are brilliant at scaffolding boilerplate but fall over on custom layouts and accessibility. Here's why, and how to brief them better.
ai
Why AI Hasn't Replaced Human Experts (Yet)
Two years into the AI-coding boom, hard questions to humans have doubled and 75% of devs verify with a person. What that means for everyone else.
ai
When AI Writes the Code: Probabilistic Engineering
AI now writes huge slabs of software. Validation, not generation, is the new bottleneck - and that quiet shift changes how trust gets built.
cloudflare
What Is Cloudflare Browser Run? A Plain-English Guide
Cloudflare's new hosted-browser API lets AI agents drive a real browser at the edge. Here's what it does, who needs it, and what it costs.
ai
What Is Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO)? Plain English
AEO is the discipline of writing pages so AI agents can read them well. A plain-English explainer of what it is and what to actually do.
aeo
What AI Says About Your Brand (And How to Fix It)
AI answers about your brand are shaped by third-party sources you don't control. Here's how to audit yours and start influencing the public record.
local-ai
Ternary Bonsai: AI That Runs on Your iPhone
A new family of AI models uses 1.58-bit weights to fit an 8B model in 1.75 GB. It actually runs on a phone. Here's how, and where it falls short.
qwen
Qwen 3.6: The Open-Source AI That Quietly Caught Up
Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 ships with 262K context, Apache 2.0, and serious coding chops. Here's what an open-weight model actually changes for you.
AI
Local LLM on Raspberry Pi 5: 2026 UK Practical Guide
Run a local LLM on a Raspberry Pi 5 with Ollama. UK guide: realistic benchmarks, power costs, hardware kits, and Home Assistant voice setup.
ai
What Actually Happens Inside Claude Code or Cursor
How AI coding agents actually work under the hood - explaining the agent loop, prompt caching and context compaction with practical takeaways.
ai
Google Chrome AI Skills: Worth the Hype (UK 2026)
Google added saved AI prompts (Skills) to Chrome - what they do, why UK readers cannot use them yet, and whether to bother.
ai-agents
GenericAgent: When an AI Builds Its Own Repo From Scratch
GenericAgent is a 3K-line open-source agent that gives an LLM full computer control - and built its own GitHub repo without human help.
ai-coding
Generating Unit Tests with AI: What Works, What Doesn't
AI coding assistants can churn out unit tests in minutes, but the shallow ones give you a false sense of confidence. Here's how to do it well.
Evaluating AI Agent Reasoning: Vakra Benchmark Lessons
IBM's Vakra benchmark reveals how AI agents really fail (tool selection + multi-step planning). A plain-English checklist for evaluating your setup.
Cloudflare Agents Week 2026: the bits that matter
Cloudflare's Agents Week 2026 shipped a small mountain of agent-building toys. Here's what actually changes for a UK developer building AI agents.
claude
Claude Design: Anthropic's Take on Design AI
Anthropic shipped Claude Design for mockups, decks and prototypes by non-designers. Here's what it does, who it's for, and what it isn't.
ai-coding-agents
How Claude Code Works: Inside Its Simple Agent Loop
Inside Claude Code deceptively simple while-loop architecture and the six open questions every AI agent builder still has to answer.
chrome
What Chrome's New AI Side-by-Side View Actually Does
Google's Chrome AI Mode now opens search results next to the AI's answer. Here's what it does, who can use it, and how it changes browsing.
ai-coding
The 'Caveman' Trick That Cuts AI Costs by 75%
Strip vowels and articles from your prompts and AI APIs cost a quarter as much. Does it actually work, and should you use it?
ai-agents
Building AI Agents That Survive Production
Most AI agents shipping today are held together with sellotape. Four architectural bets separate the production-ready ones from the prototypes.
ai-tools
Better AI Means More Ambitious Work, Not Just Faster Work
When AI coding tools step up a generation the surprise isn't that people get the same work done faster. It's that they take on bigger projects.
ai-assistants
Are We All Building the Same Digital Assistant?
Tech companies and indie builders are converging on the same AI-assistant shape. Here's what that future looks like and what's already real.
ai-coding
Why Your AI Refactor Tool Should Run in a Sandbox
OpenAI's cookbook shows AI agents migrating code inside throwaway sandboxes, with auditable patches. Here's the pattern and why it's spreading.
mcp
What Happens When AI Agents Start Paying for APIs?
Coinbase's Bazaar MCP lets AI agents pay per API call. Here's what it does, why it matters, and whether you should care today.
ai tools
Free AI Tools You Should Be Using in 2026
Eight genuinely useful free AI tools for 2026 - what each is best at, where the free tier hits its limits, and which one to pick first.
ai
Best AI Search Engines 2026: Perplexity vs ChatGPT vs Brave
Honest UK comparison of the four AI search alternatives to Google in 2026 - Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Brave, Kagi. Pricing, privacy, citation quality.
ai for mere mortals
AI for Mere Mortals Part 5: When to Trust AI Answers
How to tell when ChatGPT and other AI tools are reliable - and the simple checks that catch their hallucinations, with examples from 2026.
chatgpt
AI for Mere Mortals Part 2: Getting Started with ChatGPT
Time to actually use AI. A no-jargon, step-by-step guide to ChatGPT - setting up, writing good prompts, and 10 genuinely useful things to try today.