AI as a Craft | The Learning Design Compass

Introduction

There are two ways we tend to talk about Artificial Intelligence, and both of them miss the mark.

The first is theoretical: what AI could in principle do, the semantics about definitions, the binary assertions. To use or not to use, that is not the question. If you talk about pottery for a decade and never get clay under your nails, does that make you a potter?

The second is skill: the prompts, the tricks, the workflow that produces a clean result. "One prompt to rule them all" clickbait. This can be useful, in the way that knowing how to centre clay on a wheel is useful. But a generic competently thrown mug with no character and nothing to say is a mug that will, at best, end up unremarkable and unnoticed in a chain hotel.

Craft is the third way, and it is the only one that matters. Craft is using the material to express a thought or feeling that is yours. A potter is not really making bowls, they are making creative decisions, and the bowl is just where those decisions end up. Work with AI as a craft and the same holds true. You are not generating text. You are shaping an idea with a fast, tireless collaborator (who you suspect may have taken hallucinogenics), and the work is where the collaboration takes shape.

Here is the part that is new, and it is why this matters now in a way it didn't before. Clay never let you cheat. The laziest potter alive still had to throw the thing. AI will hand you a finished-looking bowl in four seconds with no thought, no humanity in it whatsoever, and from across the room nobody can tell.

So the old proof is gone. Effort and the human hand always came as a pair: you could not throw the bowl without standing at the wheel, deciding. We learned to read effort and trust what it stood for, that someone was present and had cared. The effort was never the value. It was the proof of it. Snap that bond, and the appearance of a great deal of work can be had for nothing, very quickly, by anyone, and the person producing it gets praised for how much they seem to be doing. You have probably watched it happen. You may have wondered, quietly, whether you ought to do the same to keep up.

You don't. That is the one thing you should know before anything else. The person turning out fast, frictionless, hollow work is not ahead of you. They have only stopped putting themselves in the work, and hollow work always reveals the incompetence of the author in the end.

Your judgement, your taste, your sense of when something is wrong and your willingness to answer for it: those are the things AI cannot do. They are not gifts, they are intuitions, they are heuristics, and you build them the way a potter builds a feel for clay: through practice. AI cannot detect bullshit, because AI is the orchestra of bullshit. Learning to hear the wrong notes, and to shape what is left into something that means something, is part of the craft.

Everything that follows in this guide will show you how to approach AI as a craft. As a way of working where the thinking stays yours, you can tell the good from the slop, and you can stand behind what you put your name to.

Test my current knowledge

Before you start, an honest look at where you already stand. There are no wrong answers, and nothing is saved or sent anywhere. Answer the six below and I'll point you at the rung worth starting on. If you're new to all this, that is rather the point of being here.

1. When you use AI, what does it usually look like? I've not really used it, or only had a quick go. I ask it one-off questions and take what it gives me. I go back and forth with it, steering and correcting as I go. I've set up a saved assistant with its own instructions that I reuse.

2. When you ask an AI for something, how much do you tell it about who you are and why? I just type a short question. I add a little context now and then. I nearly always set the scene before I ask. I've written standing instructions so I never have to repeat myself.

3. Which of these best describes an "AI agent"? I'm not sure. Any chatbot you can talk to. An AI given a fixed character and instructions so it behaves the same way every time.

4. When an AI gives you an answer, how do you treat it? I tend to take it at face value. I check the bits that feel important. I assume it might be bluffing and verify, and I can usually hear the wrong notes. I build checking into how I work, and I decide what not to hand over in the first place.

5. Running an AI model on your own computer, with no internet and no subscription: I didn't know that was possible. I've heard of it, but wouldn't know where to start. I understand roughly how it works. I've done it, or I'm set up to.

6. When you paste something into an AI tool, how do you decide what is safe to share? I don't really think about it, I paste whatever is useful. I avoid the obvious things like passwords, but not much beyond that. I stop and think about whether the information is sensitive before I share it. I only share what I'd be happy for anyone to see, and keep confidential or personal details out.

Let's get into it

So let's practise. You're going to build yourself a cooking assistant, in three moves, each one more yours than the last.

Underneath all three runs the same short discipline. Every time you reach for AI, four questions, asked until you stop noticing you ask.

Which approach? Match the approach to the job, not the other way round:

Automate it
Work it out together
Build an agent
Don't use AI

Who, what, why? Tell it who you are, what you want, and why, and then share the particulars.

Is it right, and is it you? Two checks, not one. Has it invented or dropped anything? And is your judgement actually in it, or is it just the average of everyone and no one?

Are you answerable for it? You stand behind whatever you put your name to, so ask whether this is a job you should hand over at all, and whether the use is a fair one.

⚠️ General Rule of Thumb: If you're not comfortable leaving the information on a park bench, you shouldn't share it with online AI platforms.

Approach one

How to automate tasks

Ask it what's for dinner

Hand it the cupboard and let it decide. The way to talk to AI is simple: tell it who you are, what you want, and why, then the particulars. Open any AI, free is fine, and paste this in.

Who you areWhat you wantWhy

Copy this

I'm cooking for a family of four on a weeknight, short on time and out of ideas. I want something I can make tonight in under forty minutes, because I can't face a shop and need to use what's already in. I've got chicken thighs, half a cauliflower, a bag of spinach, eggs, and the usual store-cupboard basics, and one child won't eat anything green they can see. What can I make?

Quick and handy. But it's working blind, it doesn't know you, and you can't really steer it.

The four questions:

Which Approach?Who-What-Why?Is it right?Is it you?

Approach two

How to collaborate with AI

Plan the week, together

Now make it a conversation. Start the same way, who you are, what you want, why, but this time you keep talking, swap nights, push back, tell it what your week is really like.

Who you areWhat you wantWhy

Copy this, then keep going

I'm the one who cooks for a family of four, weeknights only, and I'm tired of deciding at six o'clock every night. I want to plan the whole week in one go, reasonably balanced and not too heavy, because I'd rather shop once and stop thinking about it. Talk it through with me rather than handing me a finished list. There's swimming on Wednesday so that night needs to be quick, and no pasta more than once. Suggest a week, then let's adjust it together.

Better, because you shaped it. But next Sunday you'll set the whole thing up again, the swimming, the fussy one, the no-pasta rule, every time.

The four questions:

Which Approach?Who-What-Why?Is it right?Is it you?

Approach three

How to design agents

AI Persona Builder

Stop re-explaining yourself. Build an agent that behaves the way you want it to. Fill in the six boxes below, the examples are just a starting point, so make them yours.

Purpose

Who is this agent and why do they exist?

Describe who they are, their name, their role, what they aim to do.

Nature

What attributes are at the core of this agent's character?

This is its personality. The key is not to aim for perfection but to think about a complex character. Maybe it's insecure and feels the need to prove itself. Maybe it's rude and never sugarcoats anything. Maybe it rambles and struggles to stay on topic, which leads to interesting avenues. A negative trait can have positive outcomes depending on the situation, so to make a well-rounded character, consider the traits, both good and bad, that might draw out the best responses.

Subject

Who is this agent supporting?

This is who you're designing for. Maybe it's you, maybe a particular person or audience. Think about who they are, what they struggle with, what motivates them, where their points of friction are, and try to describe what an ideal world looks like for them.

Setting

What is the environment that discussions take place within?

This might not always be relevant, but it can help the agent to imagine itself in a setting that reflects the world you are working within. Perhaps a classroom, or a factory floor, or an alien planet where the rules of physics are different. Be imaginative and sensory.

Communication

What kind of narratives take place?

This is its communication style. Is it nurturing? Positive? Critical? Does it speak in metaphors, or keep things short? Maybe it has a particular dialect. Like its nature, give it character and depth.

Mechanisms

What sources and tools should the agent draw from to focus thinking?

This is where you outline any particular systems, tools, or processes that help frame or refine the agent's thinking. Maybe you are asking it to reference other materials that are attached to the instructions, or maybe you list specific steps within the description, but consider the situations and circumstances where it should draw on particular mechanisms and how best to utilise them.

AI Persona

The four questions:

Which Approach?Who-What-Why?Is it right?Is it you?

Going further

Next steps with agentic AI

From here you will climb a ladder. Each rung means you and your agent become more independent from online platforms.

First, try it. This part is free.

Paste your assistant at the very top of a new chat on whatever free AI you already use, and everything you say after follows it. It won't be saved, so it won't be waiting there next time, but you'll feel it work straight away. That feeling is the whole point, and it costs nothing.

I won't hand you click-by-click instructions for each rung. They change every other week, and there are a dozen ways to do each one. This method is better than that, and it is the craft itself: use the agent on the rung you are standing on to help you build the next one. You have a collaborator now. Put it to work.

Rung one. A personal agent, for you.

The simplest place to keep it. Most paid AI platforms let you save instructions once, usually under something called a project or a custom assistant, and some let you attach reference documents alongside. Paste your assistant into its instructions and it's there every time, remembering everything you set, with no re-pasting.

This is where the free tier tends to run out, since saving an agent is usually a paid feature. The names change and tools come and go, so look for whatever lets you define standing instructions for the AI.

To climb here, ask the free AI you just tried this on to walk you through setting up a saved agent on whatever paid platform you choose, and don't forget to give it the personality you built.

Rung two. A shared agent, for others.

This is for when you want other people to use it, not just you. An AI coding assistant, such as Claude Code, can turn your assistant into a small web page that runs in any browser, on a laptop or a phone. You paste the assistant in as the way it should behave, add your own API key, and it builds the thing and walks you through it, step by step.

You own the front door now, the look and the flow, but it still speaks to the platform's model through the API, so it bills by use. You end up with something properly yours: base, sauce, topping and a shopping list.

To climb here, hand the job to your personal agent from rung one. The personality is already written, so ask it to help you design the shared version, the web page, the API key, the steps, and to build it with you.

Rung three. An independent agent, beholden to no one.

The top of the ladder, where the agent owes nothing to anybody. The same assistant, the same six boxes, running on a model hosted on your own hardware. No subscription, no per-use bill, no data leaving your machine, and it works with no signal at all.

It asks a little more of your kit and a little setup, and the open models are quietly far better than most people realise. The craft does not change one inch. What changes is that the whole thing is finally, entirely yours.

To climb here, ask your personal or shared agent to help you choose a local model your hardware can run, and to walk you through getting it going. The collaborator that got you this far can get you off the platforms entirely. Just remember to ask it to highlight any potential risks and work with you to mitigate them!

Conclusion

Approaching AI as a craft is one aspect to ensure a human hand is guiding these tools and you, we, society, are benefiting from these tools and not a handful of technocrats, but another is understanding where this technology comes from, who controls it, and what the real impact this technology has on the world and you. It's important to know what levers we can pull to ensure AI is to the benefit of the many and not the few. It doesn't have to be a binary AI Good/AI Bad debate; for example, there is a trend towards people creating devices with locally hosted AI models that work for them and not tech companies. Here are some resources that are particularly worth exploring that hopefully widen your perspective on the landscape:

Empire of AI

An excellent in-depth look, and essential read, on the evolution of the AI platforms we use today, by Karen Hao.

AI Agents: I Am Here for the Rational Advancement of Mankind (as long as it can run local)

By Wendell from Level1Techs.

AI Resist List

A comprehensive list of resources that highlight the negative impact of AI and help people to practically combat against these aspects. airesistlist.org