Watercolor style: a winding path leading to a small flag on a hilltop, with broader mountain ranges and clouds stretching beyond

AI Path L0→L1 Upgrade Guide (5): Graduation Checklist & Next Steps

📖 This is Part 5 of 5 in the “AI Path L0→L1 Upgrade Guide” series — Series Navigation + Graduation Checklist. Series Navigation Part Topic Core Content Part 1 Understanding Your Tools LLM fundamentals (not a search engine), working memory vs. long-term memory, mainstream platforms and specialized tools Part 2 From Vague Questions to Precise Instructions The RBGO prompt framework, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, format constraints Part 3 Turning AI Into Your Collaboration Partner Iterative follow-up questions, context management (new conversations / progress summaries / chunked processing), role-playing Part 4 Building Your Personal System Prompt library, scenario-to-tool mapping (international and China options), layered knowledge management Part 5 Graduation & Next Steps L1 graduation checklist, L1→L2 dual-path preview ...

2026-05-30 · 2 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor style: a wooden desk with a partially open drawer revealing neatly organized pastel index cards in three rows, three sample cards fanned out on the desk surface

What My Prompt Library Looks Like: A Real Template

The biggest obstacle to building a Prompt library isn’t the tool — it’s knowing how to organize it. Yesterday you picked 5 Prompts; today I’ll show you a complete real template. Directory Structure This structure uses the Markdown folder approach. You can copy it directly: prompt-library/ ├── writing/ │ ├── email.md │ ├── article-summary.md │ └── ... ├── analysis/ │ ├── data-interpretation.md │ ├── case-breakdown.md │ └── ... ├── daily/ │ ├── meeting-notes.md │ └── ... └── README.md (global notes) The record format for each Prompt: ...

2026-05-28 · 4 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor style: an open notebook with five card-shaped slots, three filled with colored cards and two blank, scattered sticky notes nearby, a warm cream desk surface

Today's Practice: Organize Your First 5 Prompts

Today’s Practice From your recent AI conversations — coding, writing, analysis — pick 5 prompts that actually worked well. Record them using the template from Part 4: original prompt + effectiveness rating + iteration notes. Where you record them doesn’t matter — a notes app, Notion, a plain text file. Don’t overthink the tool. If you can’t find your chat history, spend 20 minutes creating 5 prompts you’ll definitely use at work. For example: “Check the edge cases in this code,” “Rewrite this technical article for beginners,” “Extract the 3 main issues from these 100 user feedbacks.” ...

2026-05-27 · 2 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor style: a neatly organized workbench with labeled glass jars, a leather journal, curated tools, and a two-drawer cabinet symbolizing tiered knowledge management

AI Path L0→L1 Upgrade Guide (4): Building Your Personal System

📖 This is Part 4 of 5 in the “AI Path L0→L1 Upgrade Guide” series. Part 1: Understanding Your Tools · Part 2: From Vague Questions to Precise Instructions · Part 3: Turning AI Into Your Collaboration Partner · Part 4: Building Your Personal System · Part 5: Graduation & Next Steps Over three weeks we’ve picked up follow-up questions, context management, role-playing… the skills are piling up, and here’s the problem: how do you manage all these scattered abilities in one place? Week 4 is about exactly that — building a prompt library, choosing the right tools, and setting up knowledge management. Turning what you’ve learned into a personal system. ...

2026-05-26 · 4 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor style: a proposal document on a wooden desk surrounded by three theatrical masks (green supporter, red critic, amber neutral) in triangular formation, symbolizing role-playing to expose blind spots

Role-Playing in Practice: Make AI Your Devil's Advocate

Yesterday we talked about follow-up questions — three questions to dig out the hidden assumptions behind an AI answer. The catch is, you need to know what to ask. Some blind spots you simply can’t see from your own perspective. That’s when you give AI a different identity. The Devil’s Advocate Please act as a strict reviewer. Go through this plan point by point and identify every risk and weakness. Don’t hold back — the sharper, the better. ...

2026-05-25 · 2 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor style: a translucent stack of papers on a desk with three follow-up checkpoints, symbolizing hidden assumptions behind AI answers

Advanced Follow-Up: 3 Questions That Expose AI's Hidden Assumptions

The previous post was about how long conversations drift. After writing it, I noticed something else: drift does not only happen after a conversation gets long. It can also happen inside any answer that looks complete. AI answers quickly, and its conclusions often sound smooth. But it rarely says upfront: what assumptions does this conclusion depend on? If those assumptions are not checked, I end up accepting them by default. Accept enough unchecked assumptions, and the later analysis may be built on the wrong foundation. ...

2026-05-24 · 3 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor style: a winding paper trail across a desk, with three stations symbolizing mixed directions, data citation errors, and requirement bleed-through

Long Conversation Failures: Lessons from 3 Drift Disasters

The previous exercise was to run a 15-turn conversation with AI, using progress summaries and new conversations as checkpoints. If you actually did it, you probably noticed something else too — drift doesn’t always look the same. The three cases below are all failures I’ve run into myself. Here’s what happened, why it happened, and how to avoid it. Failure 1: Work Directions Got Mixed Together What Happened I was figuring out the approach for a project. I first discussed Approach A with AI — building a data dashboard. After 4 turns, it didn’t feel deep enough, so I switched to Approach B — automated reports — for another 3 turns. Then I thought maybe we could combine Approach C’s real-time push capability. Three directions kept jumping around in the same conversation for a dozen turns. ...

2026-05-23 · 7 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor style: a winding river flows from upper left to lower right, with a small ferry crossing marker in the middle, symbolizing a progress calibration point in a long conversation

Today's Practice: A 15-Turn Conversation Experiment

Today’s Practice Pick a real multi-step task you have on hand, and hold a conversation with AI for at least 15 turns (one question + one answer = one turn). Example tasks: “Help me plan a family trip (destination, itinerary, budget, packing list)” “Help me set up a personal blog from scratch (pick a platform, choose a theme, write the first post)” “Help me analyze a career decision (take stock of where I am, pros and cons, action plan)” Don’t try to steer the conversation deliberately — let it unfold naturally. When the conversation reaches around turn 10, pause and send this message: ...

2026-05-22 · 2 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor illustration: two people across a large table covered in notes and sketches, deep in discussion — symbolizing iterative collaboration through multi-turn conversation

AI Path L0→L1 Upgrade Guide (3): Turning AI Into Your Collaboration Partner

📖 This is Part 3 of 5 in the “AI Path L0→L1 Upgrade Guide” series. Part 1: Understanding Your Tools · Part 2: From Vague Questions to Precise Instructions · Part 3: Turning AI Into Your Collaboration Partner · Part 4: Building Your Personal System (coming soon) · Part 5: Graduation & Next Steps (coming soon) TL;DR: Three core skills — follow-up iteration (the first answer is almost never the best), context management (periodic summaries, start fresh after ~20 turns, split complex tasks), and role-playing (assigning a role changes output depth). This week’s practice focus: deliberately run a 15+ turn long conversation and proactively do a progress summary. ...

2026-05-21 · 9 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor style: six molds in a row, each labeled with a different geometric shape, symbolizing different output format constraints

Format Constraints Cheat Sheet: 6 Prompt Templates for Ready-to-Use AI Output

Tip Card: Format Constraints Cheat Sheet Spend 10 seconds specifying a format in your prompt, save 10 minutes of reformatting afterward. Here are 6 of the most useful format constraints, each with a prompt template you can use right away. 1. Markdown Table Best for: structured information that needs comparison or summarization. “Output as a Markdown table with the following columns: Name, Description, Use Case, Notes” 2. Numbered List Best for: steps, key points, quick scanning. ...

2026-05-20 · 2 min · Alex Wang