Book 1 · Chapter 2: Choosing Your First Tool
This page is a quiz that matches your task to the right AI tool, with a first-session setup checklist.
This page assumes you've read the chapter. It hands you the tools, not the lessons.
Which-Tool Quiz
Five quick questions. Get a starting point, not a life sentence: switching later is cheap because the skills transfer.
Answer the questions and your starting tool appears here.
Download · PDF
First-Session Setup Checklist
Claude (recommended starting point)
- 1Go to claude.ai on your computer, phone, or tablet.
- 2Click "Sign up." You can use your email, Google account, or Apple account.
- 3Verify your email if prompted.
- 4You're in. No credit card needed for the free tier.
ChatGPT
- 1Go to chat.openai.com (or chatgpt.com, both work).
- 2Click "Sign up." Same options: email, Google, Apple, or Microsoft account.
- 3Verify and you're in.
Gemini
- 1Go to gemini.google.com.
- 2Sign in with your Google account. If you have Gmail, you have one.
- 3That's it. Gemini uses your existing Google login.
Your first conversation: don't just type what you need. Tell AI what's going on. Describe your situation, what you need, and what good looks like.
From the Setting Up Your Account (5 Minutes, Tops) section.
Your first conversation
- The meal plan
I need a meal plan for this week. Family of four: two adults, a 12-year-old who eats everything, and a 7-year-old who won't touch anything green. Budget is around $120 for groceries. We have chicken thighs and rice in the freezer. I need five dinners, Monday through Friday. Nothing that takes more than 40 minutes on a weeknight. Include a grocery list organized by store section.
- The dreaded client email
I need to send an email to a client who's unhappy because their project is two weeks behind schedule. The delay was partly our fault (we underestimated the design phase) and partly theirs (they took three weeks to approve the mockups). I want to acknowledge the delay, take ownership of our part without throwing them under the bus for theirs, and propose a revised timeline that gets us back on track by end of month. Tone should be professional but warm. This is a client I want to keep.
- The homework you forgot how to do
My 14-year-old has a physics homework problem about projectile motion and I need to help her, but I've forgotten how this works. The problem says: 'A ball is thrown horizontally at 15 m/s from a cliff 45 meters high. How far from the base of the cliff does it land?' Can you walk me through the solution step by step, in plain language, so I can explain it to a teenager? Don't just give me the answer. I need to understand the concept well enough to teach it.
- When the VP hates fluff
I'm a regional operations manager presenting quarterly results to my VP next Tuesday. We hit our delivery targets but our cost-per-shipment went up 8%. I need a 10-slide deck that leads with the wins, addresses the cost increase with context (fuel prices plus a new carrier onboarding), and ends with a clear plan for Q3. My VP is data-driven and hates fluff. She respects when people own problems and present solutions.