Learn With Darin · Learning Guides

Practitioner guides
for AI tools.

Long-form field notes on the AI tools you actually use day to day. No marketing copy, no surface-level overviews. Just what changes between platforms, where the limits are, and what works in practice.

Vol. I · MMXXVI Sixteen field guides Updated May 2026

Brand new to AI? № 00b · For first-timers

A gentle start.

A plain-English guide for anyone who has never used ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI chatbot. Thirty minutes from now you'll have done the three things that turn it from mystery to useful. No jargon, no setup, no commitment.

Start here →
Already comfortable № 00 · For practitioners

Best Practices.

The cross-cutting habits that work no matter which AI tool you're in front of. Twelve short stances that survive a model change, a vendor switch, and the next thing announced next month. Read this before any of the tool guides.

Read the primer →
Study companion · Claude Certified Architect

Foundations exam study & lab.

A study companion for Anthropic's first solution-architect exam. The five judgments the questions reward, the seven question patterns, and a ten-hour lab plan so you sit the exam with the muscle memory of someone who has built the thing.

Open the study guide →

Head-to-head

When the question is "which one should I pick?" rather than "how does this work?"

For everyday writing & thinking

ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini

The everyday-user comparison. Where each one wins, where each one bites, and which fits which kind of work.

Read the comparison → For agentic coding

Claude Code vs Antigravity vs Cursor

Three different bets on the same problem. Terminal-first vs multi-agent IDE vs drop-in editor replacement.

Read the comparison → For production model hosting

Bedrock vs Vertex vs Foundry

A decision matrix for picking a managed inference platform. The dimensions that actually move the choice.

Read the comparison →

Every guide

Sixteen guides across foundations, the major AI tools, and the platforms that host them. Use the chips to narrow the list.

Foundations № 00c

Everyday AI

Practical AI for life outside the office. Letters, summaries, learning, healthcare prep, money decisions, parenting, cooking. Specific recipes for ten common situations.

Read the guide → Foundations № 00d

AI Safety

Privacy and what's logged, hallucinations, sensitive content, children, workplace data, account security, bias, sycophancy, and how to calibrate trust.

Read the guide → Anthropic № 01

Claude Code

A practitioner's field guide to Anthropic's terminal coding agent. Slash commands, hooks, subagents, MCP servers, and the day-to-day workflows that pay off.

Read the guide → Anthropic № 02

Claude App

Mac vs Windows, iOS vs Android. What changes between platforms, where each falls short, and how to make Projects, Artifacts, voice, and Memory work for you.

Read the guide → Anthropic № 03

Claude Cowork

Anthropic's autonomous agent for desktop knowledge work. Connectors, plugins, scheduled tasks, dispatch, computer use, and the enterprise controls that gate them.

Read the guide → OpenAI № 04

ChatGPT

The consumer ChatGPT apps across desktop, web, and mobile. Model routing, Canvas, Custom GPTs, Tasks, voice modes, and the etiquette of each surface.

Read the guide → OpenAI № 05

Codex

OpenAI's Codex CLI and the chatgpt.com/codex cloud agent in one practical guide. How each one works, where they overlap, and which fits which task.

Read the guide → Google № 06

Gemini

Google's flagship AI app across web, Android, and the Workspace integrations. Licensing tiers, capabilities by surface, and where the Android assistant role changes the calculus.

Read the guide → Google № 07

NotebookLM

Google's source-grounded research notebook. Audio Overviews, Mind Maps, study guides, the citation-first chat surface, and what it does that no other tool does.

Read the guide → Google № 08

Antigravity

Google's agentic IDE. Multi-agent workflows, artifacts, the Manager and Editor surfaces, and how it compares to Claude Code and Cursor in real day-to-day use.

Read the guide → Google № 09

AI Studio

Google's free developer playground for the Gemini API. Prompt iteration, function calling, grounding, and the path from playground to Vertex AI when you outgrow it.

Read the guide → Microsoft № 10

Microsoft Copilot

The Microsoft 365 Copilot suite across Word, Excel, Teams, and Windows. BizChat, Copilot Studio agents, and the licensing maze you have to navigate first.

Read the guide → Mistral № 11

Le Chat

Mistral's Le Chat and the open-weight model lineup. The European data-residency story, where Mistral genuinely competes, and where a closed-lab tool is still the right call.

Read the guide → xAI № 12

Grok

xAI's Grok across X, the standalone app, and grok.com. The X integration, what makes Grok genuinely distinct, and where its tone and posture differ from the closed-lab competitors.

Read the guide → Infrastructure № 13

Local models

Running LLMs on your own hardware. Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, the GGUF and quantization story, hardware reality, and what local actually buys you (and what it doesn't).

Read the guide → Infrastructure № 14

Cloud platforms

Bedrock, Vertex AI, and Azure AI Foundry. Multi-model managed inference, when it makes sense over going direct, and how the three differ in practice.

Read the guide →