How to Learn AI in One Sentence: Keep a Diary
A follower on Douyin asked me: how do I learn to use AI?
My answer is one sentence: keep a diary.
Not memorizing prompts, not hoarding tutorials — a diary. Hear me out.
Why AI Gives You “Correct Nonsense”
Have you noticed? AI seems to know everything, yet the moment you ask about your own life, everything it says is technically correct and completely useless.
It’s not that the model is weak. It’s that it doesn’t know you.
Ask it “should I quit my job,” and it has no idea how old you are, how much you’ve saved, what your family situation is, or what your boss is like. It can only give answers that hold for everyone — and an answer that holds for everyone is, for you specifically, noise.
It’s like booking the best specialist in the country, walking in, and saying only “doctor, I don’t feel well” while refusing every question. Even a miracle worker can only tell you to drink more water.
AI is that specialist: genuinely brilliant, but every conversation with you is its first. If you don’t hand over your medical history, all it can do is make small talk.
The real divide in using AI is not whether you can write clever prompts. It’s whether the AI knows you.
Fifteen Minutes: Build Your Personal Dossier
The method could not be simpler. Open your phone’s notes app, create a document called “My Dossier,” and write four things —
- Who I am: age, occupation, current situation;
- What I want: goals, ideally with deadlines;
- Where I’m stuck: status quo, biggest obstacles, what cards I hold;
- How I like to be answered: e.g. “give me the conclusion straight, don’t comfort me.”
Fifteen minutes for the first version. It doesn’t need to be perfect.
Usage: Asking Cold vs. Asking with a Dossier
From now on, before every important question, paste the entire dossier to the AI first, then ask.
Try it once and you’ll see: the same question, asked cold versus asked with your dossier, produces two different species of answer. One is boilerplate for a stranger; the other is advice for you, the specific person.
With your subjective and objective context, AI can locate your real problem fast — even point out blind spots you can’t see yourself. Put your goals in the dossier and it can break them into sub-goals and weekly plans, then hold you to them week after week — your role shifts from “the one asking” to “the one being supervised.” Authorize it with one line: “Don’t comfort me. Check me against the plan and call out where I’m lying to myself.”
Five Minutes a Week: This Is the Diary
Afterwards, spend five minutes a week updating the dossier: what happened, how far the goals moved, what’s newly stuck.
This is the diary from the opening line — except it’s written for your AI. The more alive the dossier, the better the AI knows you. It is memory you install into AI with your own hands, and it isn’t locked into any vendor’s product: switch to a different AI, paste it over, and it works the same.
I take this much further myself: I have sixteen AI instances sharing one git brain, so the AI on every machine knows me and picks up where the last one left off (that system is called Nestwork — I’ve written about it separately). The principle is identical to the dossier: you own the context; the AI is just its reader.
Appendix: The Dossier Template
Copy and fill it in — fifteen minutes for the first version:
# My Dossier (updated: ____)
## Who I am
- Age / occupation / city:
- Current situation (one or two sentences):
## What I want
- Goal 1 (with deadline):
- Goal 2 (optional):
## Where I'm stuck
- Status quo:
- Biggest obstacle:
- Cards I hold (skills / resources / people):
## How I like to be answered
- Conclusions first, no comforting
- Action advice first, reasons second
- (add your own)
## This week's update
- What happened:
- Goal progress:
- New blockers:
Build your dossier today. Write the first version now.