What to keep, and where to go next
Fourteen lessons compress into a short list. Here it is, along with an honest account of what Ananya ended up with and where you go from here.
The one-page personal policy
Write this once, at the start of a term, and it removes almost every 2am decision.
What I always delegate. Formatting, citation styles, converting between formats, extraction into tables, tidying my own prose, translating my own writing. No guilt, no thought, take the time back.
What I never delegate. Reading abstracts and conclusions. Forming my view of what a paper argues. Deciding what my argument is. The first draft. Anything I would have to defend in a viva.
How I use it on the hard parts. As an opponent, not an author. Asking for questions, not answers. Explaining what I am stuck on, then closing the tab and writing from memory.
What I check, every time. Every citation exists and says what I claim. Every number came from the source. Every claim I make is one I could defend.
What I disclose. Specifically, in writing, at the end.
The weekly rhythm
Reading: pass one yourself, then unblock with AI, then a four-part note in your own words, then five questions parked for later.
Writing: reactions to claim, claim to opposition, opposition to structure, structure to a bad draft you wrote, bad draft to a good one via critique rather than rewriting.
Revising: questions from your own notes, answered on a blank page, marked without generosity, three times spread out.
That is the whole method. It is not complicated, and its difficulty is entirely in the fact that the correct version feels worse at the time than the incorrect one.
What happened to Ananya
The paper argued that heat island research is skewed toward night-time measurement because it is cleaner to measure, and that the skew has policy consequences for people whose exposure is in the afternoon. It cited nine sources, all of which she had read. It answered three objections, one of which she had not thought of.
She got a good grade. Two weeks later, in a seminar, someone challenged the claim and she defended it — including conceding one point and holding the other two. That exchange, not the mark, is what the three weeks were for, and it is available only to someone who did the parts that could not be delegated.
The mid-term she prepared for with a question bank from her own notes, answered three times across two weeks. She has since forgotten a good deal of it, which is normal, and can rebuild it quickly, which is the actual test.
Where to go next
If you want to know what is actually happening inside the tool you have been using — why it invents citations, why it is fluent about things it does not know, what "training" and "context" really mean — read How AI Actually Works. It is plain English and no mathematics, and it makes the failure modes in this course predictable rather than surprising.
If you want to get better at asking — because you will have noticed that the quality of what comes back tracks the quality of what you ask almost exactly — AI for Everyday Work covers briefing, iterating, and verification as general skills, in a work context that transfers straight back to study.
If you want to build something with it rather than only use it — a study tool, a searchable index of your own notes, an assistant that knows your module — Build AI Tools Without Code does exactly that, and lesson 10 there is a chatbot over your own documents, which is a genuinely good use of a corpus of lecture notes.
If your field is technical and you are heading toward research or industry, Your First AI Project is the bridge into the technical shelf, starting from a blank browser tab.
And the Library is a shelf of annotated primary sources — papers, preprints, and whitepapers with plain-English notes on what each one actually claims. Lesson 5's three-pass method is exactly what it is for.
The last thing
The students who get the most out of this technology are not the ones who use it most. They are the ones who decided, early and deliberately, which half of their work it was allowed to touch — and then used it relentlessly on that half.
That decision is not about rules or detection or getting caught. It is about which version of yourself walks out with the degree.
Do this today: write your one-page policy. Not the full version — the two lists that matter, what you always delegate and what you never do. Ten minutes, and it will save you from a hundred small decisions made badly under deadline pressure.