Lesson 1 · Part 1
The stranger at your desk
Imagine hiring the world's smartest temp worker. They read incredibly fast, write beautifully, never get tired — and every single morning they arrive having forgotten everything: your name, your job, yesterday's decisions, all of it. That is exactly what an AI assistant is. The intelligence is real. The memory between conversations, by default, is not.
When people say an AI agent, they mean that temp worker given a desk and responsibilities: not just answering questions, but doing tasks — reading email, planning, writing documents. Which makes the forgetting problem much worse. You can't delegate to someone who doesn't know who you are.
Lesson 1 · Part 2
What “context” actually means
Everything an AI knows during a conversation sits in one place: its context — think of it as the papers currently on the temp worker's desk. Your message is on the desk. Its instructions are on the desk. Anything not on the desk effectively does not exist, no matter how important it is to you.
So the entire craft of making AI genuinely useful comes down to one unglamorous question: what do we put on the desk, every single time?
Lesson 1 · Part 3
The fix is embarrassingly old-fashioned
You write things down. Good AI setups keep a small set of plain-text documents — who you are, how you work, what the assistant is allowed to do, what it should remember — and place them on the desk at the start of every conversation, automatically. No magic. A well-organized binder.
Over the next five lessons we'll look at what goes in that binder — and instead of using some abstract executive, we'll use an assistant for someone whose life you already know completely: Mickey Mouse. His assistant is named Toodles. By lesson six, you'll know more about AI context than most people using AI at work today.