Talking to Machines
Shalin Shodhan
20 years in games & film.
- Pixar Animation Studios 6 feature films · 3 Academy Awards
- Electronic Arts — Spore BAFTA Award for Technical Achievement
- Lumosity Principal Game Developer
- Masala Games — Founder Detective Dotson · Word Mess (#1 in 21 countries)
- Carnegie Mellon University MET — Entertainment Technology
The Approach
Demos. Mental models. Lay of the land.
Build Something
Agentic coding — on-demand software.
Your 90-Day Plan
The roadmap. Prototype the pieces.
The approach.
- Lay of the land — tools & what's possible
- Mental models for talking to machines
- Live demos
Build something.
On-demand software — the real unlock.
- The stack — just enough to be dangerous
- Agentic coding, end to end
- Leave with something running
Your 90-day plan.
The ultimate takeaway.
- Map your business to Know / Do / Show
- Prototype the highest-leverage pieces
- Walk out with a plan for Monday
Your handy guide in this course.
11 chapters · interactive widgets · live AI demos.
Lay of the land.
The approach.
The mental models that actually matter
Learn for the AI of tomorrow.
Build around approach, not tools.
Getting the most out of AI is not a technical problem.
It's a communication problem.
Three moves. On repeat.
Pick the right AI for the task.
When in doubt — ask AI which AI to use.
Don't perfect the prompt. Frame the conversation.
The session is the unit — not the message.
Great examples beat great instructions.
Show what good looks like. Show what bad looks like.
Ask AI to ask you questions.
Socratic beats one-shot. Every single time.
Ask AI for help with AI.
Use the machines on each other.
Iteration is everything.
Three to five passes. Every time.
AI wants to give you a quick win. Don't take it.
Push back. Ask what it's holding back.
Never trust one machine.
Same task. Three models. Compare.
Always humanize the output.
Nothing ships raw. Deslop every time.
Conviction. Art. Sense. Judgment.
These come from you. Not the machine.
Your sessions become your SOP.
The conversations are the corpus. Guard them.
Every AI task is one of three things.
Know
Research · reasoning · brainstorming. Input and output are understanding.
Do
Agents · automations · software. Input: intent. Output: a thing happening.
Show
Decks · sites · apps · videos. Input: a message. Output: something consumable.
The cheat sheet.
All 15, one page →Deep research.
Let's find India's best mutual funds. Live.
The age of personal software for all.
See you on Day Two.