Preview of AI Bootcamps for Lawyers: AI 301

Note: This was originally posted on LinkedIn.

You don’t learn guitar by reading about guitar. You sit down and play badly.

I’ve been running AI bootcamps for lawyers: Intro to AI 301. These are for legal folks (not engineers) who already use Gemini, ChatGPT or Harvey daily. They want to learn more powerful AI features, including coding.

But most haven’t touched a terminal since DOS.

So yes, 60% of the session is setup. Learning terminal commands. Creating working folders. Unblocking enterprise restrictions.

Is it a chore?

🌟 Yes, but that 60% IS the learning! 🌟

Each friction point teaches something about AI’s product limits -- whether it’s clunky setup or broken plumbing between tools (see my last post on AI’s plumbing problem).

But there’s also delight. AI can be a self-healing system. When we hit a problem, we didn’t just stop. We asked AI to debug itself and fix that same problem.

A tool that fixes itself. A tool that teaches you how to use it.

Does this take technical skill? No, but it takes persistence.

You don’t pick up a guitar, play one bad chord and throw it away. You don’t open a terminal, hit one error and quit.

In one hour of AI 301, each lawyer used the terminal, ran slash commands, customized their own claude.md file, managed a context window and coded a small project from scratch. They brainstormed, planned, iterated and debugged.

On a personal note: I played classical guitar growing up. Barre chords are not fun. Raw fingertips are not fun. But you keep going until the friction turns into music.

That’s what AI fluency looks like. Not just reading about it. Playing badly until you don’t.