AI for people who haven’t started yet: a beginner’s guide to Claude and ChatGPT

If you’ve never really used ChatGPT or Claude, or you tried it once and didn’t see the fuss, this guide is for you. It’s based on our AI for people who haven’t started yet session at Mill Street, and it covers what AI actually is, how to start using it, and how to get answers that don’t sound like a bank wrote them.

Strip away the hype and AI is a little white box: you type, it answers. That’s it. The rest of this guide is about what to type in it.

How to start using AI as a complete beginner

You don’t need an AI course

Full disclosure: I’ve never done an AI course. No training, no certificate, nothing. Everything I know, I learned by asking it how to do stuff. So if I can get here, anyone can.

Think of AI as a new assistant on their first day

The easiest way to think about it is a new assistant on day one. They’ve read loads, they’re keen and they’ll do anything you ask. But they’ve never met you, they don’t know your clients and they’ve got no idea how you like things done. So you tell them, same as you’d tell a person.

Ask the AI how to start

This is the most useful thing to know as a beginner. If you don’t know how to start, ask it how to start. Type something like “I’ve never used AI, I run a café, what should I try first?” and it’ll walk you through it.

Claude Projects: stop explaining yourself every time

In Claude you can make a project, which is basically a folder. Add files to it and every chat you start inside it already knows your stuff. Put in what a new assistant would need:

• About you: a bit about you and your business.
• Your voice: how you like to sound.
• The offer: your services and prices.
• The look: your brand book.
• The proof: a few bits of work you’re proud of.
• Everything else: client documents, vision decks, anything relevant. Past emails you’ve written are gold for your tone of voice.

Ten minutes setting it up saves you explaining yourself every single time. Then keep each chat short and to one task: one chat for the newsletter, another for the proposal, not one giant thread for everything.

How to set up a Claude Project

• Create a project: hit new project, give it a name and say what you’re trying to do.
• Add your files: Context is where your files go. Instructions is where you tell it how to behave, like “always use British English” or “keep it short”.
• Chat inside it: ask for this week’s run club post and it already knows your tone and your business.

Which AI tool to use: Claude for words, ChatGPT for pictures

People get stuck on which one to use. We use Claude for about 80% of everything: writing, planning, emails, even coding and web design. When we want an image made, we use ChatGPT. Gemini and the rest exist too, but picking one and going deep beats dabbling in five. Both are free to try, so don’t overthink it.

AI tools for music and websites

• Suno for music: tell it the style, give it a few lines and it’ll make you a song.
• Claude Design for website design: work out how the site should look.
• Claude Code for the website build: then get it to actually build it.

Claude Design and Claude Code both sit inside Claude, so there are no extra accounts to set up. Same rule as everything else: tell it what you want and show it what you like.

How to write better AI prompts

Rubbish in, rubbish out

There’s really one rule. If you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out. Put a bit of effort into what you ask for and it scrubs up nicely. Here are two examples, each with a lazy prompt and a better one.

Example 1: an email to a client who’s paid late

The lazy prompt is what most people type: “Write an email to a client.” What comes back starts “I hope this email finds you well” and signs off “[Your Name]”. It sounds like a bank wrote it.

The better prompt explains what’s happened (a client who’s paid late twice, who’s also a mate), how it should come across (polite and friendly but firm, under 100 words) and, crucially, includes a real email I sent so it can copy how I sound. What came back actually sounded like me. Giving it an example works for everything, not just emails.

Example 2: a poster for a comedy night

The same goes for images. “Make a poster for a comedy night” gets you a poster with [DATE] and [VENUE NAME] still on it. For the better version I described exactly what I wanted and attached a photo of me, a poster whose style I liked and screenshots of our website, so it matched our branding.

What a good AI prompt includes

A good prompt has four parts. You won’t need all four every time, but the more you give it, the better the result.

• The situation: what’s going on, and who it’s for.
• The job: what you want it to make.
• The vibe: how it should sound, and how long.
• An example: AI is a pattern-matcher, so give it something to match. Something you’ve written, or something you like.

Writing the prompt is the creative bit

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Rick Rubin is one of the biggest music producers ever, and he’s said he can’t really play anything. What he’s brilliant at is knowing when something’s right. He’s even written a book about vibe coding. You don’t need technical skills, you need taste: knowing what you like and what you don’t, and the confidence to direct. That’s where we are with AI: we bring the taste and the ideas, and it does a lot of the legwork.

Beginner AI prompts to copy

Copy one, swap in your own details. And if you fancy a stress test, give it the hardest, most annoying job on your list this week and score what comes back out of ten. Be harsh. It can take it. Stuck for one? Try “Plan a team away day for 10 people in Leamington, under £500, with a rainy-day option.”

Don’t stop at the first answer

A common beginner mistake is taking the first answer and giving up. Treat it like a conversation and tell it what to change, like you would with a person:

• “Make it shorter.”
• “Sound more like me.”
• “Give me three options.”
• “What have I missed?”
• “Ask me questions before you start.”

The back and forth is where the good stuff comes from.

Over 100 prompts later, I built our website

Keep going and it adds up. Over a hundred prompts later, I’d built the new Mill Street website, the one you’re reading now. No course, no developer background, just asking it how to do the next bit, again and again.

Two things to watch out for with AI

Long chats go weird, so start a new one

Each chat remembers everything you’ve said in it, so long chats get messy and it can start just agreeing with you, a bit like confirmation bias. Or it swings the other way and gets oddly harsh. If it goes weird, open a new chat and start fresh. Anything it should always know, like your brand book, goes in your project.

AI can be confidently wrong

That’s called a hallucination: it’s writing what sounds right, not checking what’s true. So check anything that matters, and keep private stuff like client details out of it. It’s also worth going into the settings in Claude or ChatGPT and turning off the option that lets them use your chats to improve their models.

Your homework: five minutes with AI

Here’s the one thing to do after reading this. Next time you’ve got a spare moment, get your phone out, put five minutes aside and ask it to do one thing you’ve been putting off. That email. That price list. That bio you’ve been meaning to rewrite since 2019.

I didn’t do a course. I just asked, and that’s all you need to do too. Give it a go this week.