How-to guide17 min
Getting good results from AI coding assistants
Give context, work in small steps, verify with tests — a workflow that makes AI-written code something you can trust.
PracticalDevelopers
Learn
Practical AI guides and plain-language explainers. Filter by role and level.
All guides
Type
Role
Level
How-to guide12 min
Let AI do the totals instead of a pivot table
You don't need to know the PivotTable menus: describe the rows, columns and values, and the assistant writes the formula. The numbers come from the sheet or from code, never from the chat, and you check them against the source.
PracticalOffice workersMarketers
How-to guide14 min
Find insights in campaign results
Do the maths in your spreadsheet and the interpreting with AI. Turn campaign results into insights written as observation, hypothesis and how to check, then pick your next experiment.
PracticalMarketers
How-to guide14 min
Keep a character or product consistent across scenes
Pin down what must never change in a character sheet, then use a fixed block and reference images to keep the same look in every scene.
PracticalDesignersMarketers
How-to guide15 min
Get structured (JSON) output from an LLM
Instead of asking for JSON and hoping, define the shape as a schema and get responses your code can use directly. Worked through with a customer-message classifier.
PracticalDevelopers
How-to guide15 min
Cut API costs with prompt caching
Cache the long instructions and documents you resend with every request, and their input cost drops sharply. Using a support bot built on a manual, here's how to place the cache point and check that it works.
PracticalDevelopers
How-to guide18 min
A minimal RAG chatbot with ten documents
Build a Python chatbot that searches ten internal policy documents with embeddings and answers only from what it finds, then test search and answers separately and fix what breaks.
PracticalDevelopers