Use and modify the prompt at the bottom of each section to go deeper with any AI tool, at your own pace. Change the framing, add your own context, or ask it to go further — the prompt is a starting point, not a script.
Tokens.
The unit AI uses to process language. Understanding tokens helps you understand why AI has limits on what it can read, remember, and produce — and how to work within them.
When you type a message to an AI, it doesn't read words the way you do. It breaks everything down into tokens — chunks that are roughly three-quarters of a word. "Understanding" becomes two or three tokens. A full page of text is around 400–500 tokens.
This matters because every AI model has a token limit — a fixed window of how much it can hold in a single conversation. When you hit that limit, earlier parts of your conversation start falling away. It's why a long session can feel like the AI "forgot" what you told it earlier — it literally did.
Knowing this changes how you work: you front-load the important information, you're deliberate about what you include, and you understand why shorter, focused sessions often produce better results than marathon conversations.
Prompt: go deeper on tokens
Use and modify this in any AI tool:
Explain tokens in AI like I'm a smart professional who has never written code. What are they, why do they matter, and how do they affect the way I should structure my conversations with AI? Include a practical example showing how the same request can use very different amounts of tokens depending on how it's written.
Markdown.
A simple way to add structure to plain text — headings, lists, bold, links — that AI models understand natively. The common language between you and every AI tool.
Markdown is a set of simple text conventions that add structure without complexity. A # makes a heading. A - makes a bullet point. ** makes text bold. That's most of it.
The reason it matters for AI work is that every major AI model reads and writes Markdown fluently. When you structure your prompts with clear headings and lists, the AI produces better, more organised output. When it responds, it uses Markdown to structure what it gives you.
Learning Markdown takes about ten minutes and means you're communicating with AI in its native format. It's also the format behind most modern documentation and note-taking tools like Notion and Obsidian. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.
Prompt: go deeper on Markdown
Use and modify this in any AI tool:
Teach me Markdown in under five minutes. Start with the six things I'll use 90% of the time, show me what each one looks like when typed and when rendered, and then give me a practical exercise: a short document I can write in Markdown right now to practice. Assume I've never used it before but I'm comfortable with technology.
Context.
What the AI can see and remember during a conversation. Managing context well is the difference between useful output and generic responses.
Context is everything the AI has access to when generating a response: your current message, the conversation history, any files or documents you've provided, and its system instructions. The quality of AI output is almost entirely determined by the quality of context you give it.
Context management is the practice of being deliberate about what the AI knows. This means providing relevant background upfront, not assuming it remembers things from previous conversations (it usually doesn't), keeping conversations focused rather than sprawling across topics, and knowing when to start fresh.
In the workshop, the detailed brief you wrote wasn't just creative writing — it was context engineering. Every detail you provided gave the AI better material to work with.
Prompt: go deeper on context
Use and modify this in any AI tool:
Explain context in AI conversations as if I'm a professional who uses AI regularly but wants to get significantly better results. Cover: what context actually means technically, why the same prompt can produce wildly different results in different conversations, and give me five specific techniques for managing context more deliberately. Use real examples, not abstract principles.
This article is a companion to the Vibe Coding for Everyone workshop from Ringier Future Summit 2026. More resources at futuresummit.dylanharbour.com.