Terminal Agent for Absolute Beginners · Lesson 1
The phone chat is 10% of what AI can do
Why chatting in an app is a storefront, not the whole store, and how you under-use AI when you only talk to it on your phone.
Practical exercise
What to do after this lesson
Recall three tasks from the past week where you manually copied text into an AI chat (from an email, a document, a website). Write them down — by the end of the course you will hand such tasks to the agent whole, no copying.
Task grader
Recall three tasks from the past week where you manually copied text into an AI chat (from an email, a document, a website). Write them down — by the end of the course you will hand such tasks to the agent whole, no copying.
Ready-to-use prompt
Template for this lesson
Copy and adapt to your context. Text in angle brackets should be replaced.
I am a regular user; I have only used AI in a phone chat. Here is what my day looks like: <describe your typical tasks>. Tell me which of these an AI agent could do for me on its own, in plain language, no jargon.
Prompt sandbox
Common mistakes
What people get wrong
- Assuming AI "just writes text" and never trying real actions.
- Copying chunks back and forth instead of giving the agent the whole file.
- Thinking real AI is only for programmers. It is for everyone.