Prelude

Getting Started

• OptionalGetting Started with Claude Code (3 hr 4 min)Aniket Panjwani (2026)
• OptionalGetting Started with Codex (4 hr 3 min)Aniket Panjwani (2026)

Where Do AI Answers Come From?

• RecommendedLarge Language Models, Explained with a Minimum of Math and Jargon (30 min)Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott (2023)
• RecommendedHow an AI Token Travels Through a Data Center (25 min)Chris Zeoli (2026)
• OptionalWhat Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? (1 hr 20 min)Stephen Wolfram (2023)
• OptionalLarge Language Models Explained Briefly (8 min)Grant Sanderson, 3Blue1Brown (2024)
• OptionalWe Did the Math on AI’s Energy Footprint. Here’s the Story You Haven’t Heard. (25 min)James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart (2025)
• OptionalWhat Actually Happens When You Press ‘Send’ to ChatGPT (15 min)ByteByteGo (2025)
• OptionalA History of Large Language Models (60 min)Gregory Gundersen (2025)
• OptionalThe Non-Technical Technical DictionaryCathryn Lavery (2026)

Best Practices

• Recommended15 Times to Use AI, and 5 Not To (7 min)Ethan Mollick (2024)
• RecommendedAI Hurtles Ahead (30 min)Howard Marks (2026)
• OptionalBeat Your Bot: Building Your Moat Against AI (13 min)Aswath Damodaran (2024)
• OptionalHow I Use LLMs (2 hr 11 min)Andrej Karpathy (2025)

Prescient Reads

• RecommendedEconomic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (essay)John Maynard Keynes (1930)
• RecommendedIronies of Automation (essay)Lisanne Bainbridge (1983)
• RecommendedWhy Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation (paper (JEP, non-technical))David Autor (2015)
• RecommendedThe Bitter Lesson (5 min)Rich Sutton (2019)
• OptionalPhaedrus (book)Plato (c. 370 BCE)
• OptionalThe Use of Knowledge in Society (essay)Friedrich Hayek (1945)
• OptionalComputing Machinery and Intelligence (essay)Alan Turing (1950)
• OptionalPlayer Piano (book)Kurt Vonnegut (1952)
• OptionalMan-Computer Symbiosis (essay)J.C.R. Licklider (1960)
• OptionalSome Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation (essay)Norbert Wiener (1960)
• OptionalDiffusion of Innovations (book)Everett Rogers (1962)
• OptionalThe Tacit Dimension (book)Michael Polanyi (1966)
• OptionalDesigning Organizations for an Information-Rich World (essay)Herbert Simon (1971)
• OptionalThe Mythical Man-Month (book)Fred Brooks (1975)
• OptionalOn the Foolishness of “Natural Language Programming” (essay)Edsger W. Dijkstra (1978)
• OptionalProgramming as Theory Building (essay)Peter Naur (1985)
• OptionalNo Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering (essay)Fred Brooks (1986)
• OptionalThe System of Professions (book)Andrew Abbott (1988)
• OptionalThe Dynamo and the Computer (essay)Paul David (1990)
• OptionalManaging the Professional Service Firm (book)David Maister (1993)
• OptionalCode (book)Charles Petzold (1999)
• OptionalKnowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge (essay)Peter Drucker (1999)
• OptionalThe Big Blob of Compute Hypothesis (essay)Dario Amodei (2017)
• OptionalThe Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI (essay)Rodney Brooks (2017)
• OptionalAutomation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor (paper)Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo (2019)
• OptionalChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (essay)Ted Chiang (2023)