About This Course
On Friday, November 14th, 2025, I met a brilliant young computer science senior from the University of Minnesota for coffee. He had just accepted an internship at a company run by my friend Justin Grammens, who suggested we meet to talk about careers in computer science.
As we chatted, something wonderful happened. I discovered that while this student was clearly talented and incredibly enthusiastic about AI, there were some gaps in his knowledge about search and information retrieval—topics that would be crucial for building the chatbots Justin needed him to work on. Having spent years at a search company (MarkLogic) building semantic search systems driven by ontologies (Smartlogic), I could see that a single well-designed course could make all the difference in his success.
That night, an idea sparked! What if I put my new Claude Code Skills to work and created exactly that course?
The next morning, I dove in with excitement. I started by writing a detailed course description, drawing on memories of the dozens of search and chatbot projects I'd built over the years. I realized I might have more to contribute than I'd given myself credit for! Once I had a course overview and topic list, I used my skills to refine the learning objectives around Bloom's Taxonomy. When I got my quality score up to 95/100, I pulled the trigger and BOOM! The learning graph appeared before me—not perfect, but definitely workable.
From there, it became an exciting collaboration with Claude Code to ensure the content was both relevant and accurate. Now, I'm not naive about thinking this is finished. While the Claude Code Skills generated high-quality content, the diagram descriptions are just placeholders waiting to come alive. There are 43 diagrams that need to be transformed into engaging figures, infographics, charts, timelines, and MicroSims. Although I have a growing toolkit of skills to turn specifications into working MicroSims, the devil is in the details—LLMs can be notoriously finicky about visual layouts!
It's my sincere hope that this textbook, which started as a Saturday morning inspiration, will be useful to that enthusiastic student and many others on their AI journey.
If you'd like to help build this textbook or create others like it, I'd love to hear from you! Please reach out on LinkedIn.
Looking forward to connecting!
- Dan McCreary Saturday, November 15th, 2025