The seven lessons

Not Rest Inc. · Use AI properly · 7 short lessons

AI is the most capable tool most people have ever been handed, and almost nobody was handed the manual. This is the manual — short, practical, and honest about what the machine actually does. Seven readings, each a few minutes, each standalone. No hype, no fear, no jargon that doesn't pay rent. Use the arrows to move through the lessons.

1. How the model reads — tokens, the context window, and prediction: the mental model that explains almost every success and failure you'll have.
2. Why it makes things up — hallucination, honestly: where invention happens, why confidence means nothing, and the four defenses.
3. What an AI agent actually is — the difference between a chatbot and an agent, and why boundaries matter more than intelligence.
4. ORACLE — six slots that turn a vague request into a prompt that performs.
5. Don't accept the first answer — self-critique, options, editor-grade feedback: the conversation is the skill.
6. Where your words go — what happens to what you type, the training question, and the four rules for pasting anything.
7. Using AI properly — the principles: verify, bound, approve. What to trust, what to check, what to never hand over.

This material comes from the live workshop we run at do.not.rest — the consulting door of Not Rest. For the full version, with your own systems on the table, write to do@not.rest.

Also here: the session harness workshop — an eight-stop walk through the scaffolding our own working sessions run inside.