ChatGPT and Claude can help you draft, learn, summarize, brainstorm, and translate. They predict useful language from the context you give them. They do not automatically know your goal, standards, or current facts.

Three ideas make early conversations better:

• A prompt is the instruction and material you provide.
• A token is a small unit the system reads and writes.
• A context window is the working space for one conversation.

Start with work you can review. Ask for a specific audience, outcome, and format. Then inspect the result and improve the request.

Treat confident statements as drafts when facts matter. Check important claims against a source you trust. Later lessons introduce Codex and Claude Code for bounded work in files.