Note

Nouns and verbs

You don't learn AI by memorizing the vocabulary.

When I started learning AI seriously, I collected nouns. RAG. MCP. CLI. Context window. SOP. I could define all of them, and for a while that felt like progress.

It wasn't, really. Knowing the name of a thing is level one.

The real learning happened when I switched to verbs: build something, test it, watch it fail, fix it, use it again next week. My first scraper taught me more about context and prompting than a month of reading did, mostly because it kept breaking in ways no article had warned me about.

The verbs also forced me to get organized. I now keep a simple rule: project material stays in the project folder. Only the things I'll reuse, the workflows, prompts and templates that survived a real task, earn a place in my own little operating system with Obsidian.

That's the goal, I think. Not to learn more tools, but to build a way of working that gets a bit better every time I use it.

The nouns are still useful. But nobody ever learned to cook by collecting recipes. :)