Category AI Guides

Eight techniques — full questions, pinned dates, named sources, shaped answers, follow-up interrogation — that make AI search retrieve better and cite more honestly.

The Tow Center tested 1,600 questions across eight AI search tools. The four failure modes it found — confident errors, wrong citations, fabricated links, invisible retrieval gaps.

Three answer engines, three designs: citation-first research, a chatbot that searches, and a summary inside Google. Accuracy data, costs, and which tool fits which job.

The summary at the top of Google is generated from the same index as the links below it. Triggers, query fan-out, sources and controls — from Google’s own documentation and Pew’s data.

How AI coding assistants actually work — autocomplete, chat and agents — what the research says they do for beginners, and the habits that turn one into a teacher instead of a shortcut.

Does it cost money? Which language should you start with? Is your code private? Straight answers to the eight questions every beginner asks about AI coding tools.

Ten passes that catch most AI code problems before they cost you: read it, run it, break it on purpose, check the imports, and never ship a secret.

Accepting code you can’t read, asking for whole apps at once, skipping the run — the seven habits that slow beginners down, each with the fix and the survey data behind it.

Beginners usually meet AI coding help in one of three shapes: an assistant inside the editor that completes code as you type (GitHub Copilot), or a chatbot in a browser tab you paste code into and talk with (ChatGPT, or…

Your first session with an AI coding assistant, done properly: set up, pick a tiny project, ask well, run everything, check everything — and finish with code you understand.