What’s in the guide
The interactive guide above covers five areas:
- What is Claude?, the mental model, what it can and can’t do, and how it differs from search
- Skills, what slash commands and saved workflows are, and how to build your own for L&D tasks
- MCP & Tools, what Model Context Protocol is, and how it connects Claude to files, systems, and APIs
- Build with AI, a catalog of L&D artifacts Claude can help you create, from storyboards to interactive HTML simulations
- Start Here, a five-day ramp-up plan for getting real value out of Claude on actual work
The core idea
Claude works best as a thinking accelerant, not a content vending machine. The faster you learn to give it real constraints and push back on generic answers, the more useful it becomes.
The prompts and patterns in the guide are ones I’ve tested against real instructional design projects, needs analyses, branching scenarios, evaluation plans, and code-built learning tools. They’re starting points, not scripts.