AI Adopters Club

AI Adopters Club

Stop Using AI as a Search Engine If You Want It to Teach You Anything

Two prompts. One makes AI interview you before it teaches. One stops you faking that you get it.

Kamil Banc's avatar
Kamil Banc
Aug 31, 2026
∙ Paid
In partnership with Right Click Prompt, the best way to share prompts online.

Hey Adopter,

Your boss drops a new area or responibility on your desk. A vendor’s tool you have to evaluate, or the finance behind a business case you are presenting Friday. You need to learn it, fast.

So you buy a course, or you open a chatbot and ask it to explain the thing. Both fail the same way, and the numbers back it up. About 88 in 100 people who start an online course quit before the end. The course was never built for you.

Loading...

The point is, you end up sounding informed without being able to use it. You nod through the meeting and cannot run the numbers or push back on the vendor. The colleague who picked up the same area in a week becomes the one your boss trusts with the next project. They picked up a method for exactly this. You have not switched it on yet.

We have known the method since 1984. Work one to one with a tutor and you beat a classroom by a mile, enough that the average tutored student scores above 98 percent of the room. Too expensive to give everyone a private tutor. That was the wall.

AI knocks the wall down, and almost nobody sets it up to. Most people run it in the one mode that keeps them stuck at 88 percent. Two prompts change that.

Stop using AI like a search engine

Ask a question, take the answer, move on. That is search with extra steps. The model has no idea where you are stuck, so it explains everything to everyone the same way. Same reason the course lost you.

A tutor does two things a search box never will. It interviews you before it teaches. And it will not let you nod along without understanding. The two prompts below force that behavior. Copy them as they are.

The advisor prompt

Use this when you need to learn something and want a plan built around you, not a course built for the average student.

It will not give you a plan until it interviews you and pulls out five decisions, one question at a time. It asks where you are starting and what you need to be able to do at the end, then works back from there. Most people skip this and ask for the six-week plan straight away. They get a syllabus that burns week one on things they already know and never reaches the part they came for. The interview kills that.

This post is for paid subscribers

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2026 Kamil Banc · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture