About Nerdsmith
Teaching AI fluency for work, life, and everything in between.
There's a weird gap in how people learn AI right now.
On one side, you have beginner tutorials that teach you how to sign up for ChatGPT and ask it to write a poem. On the other, you have technical content about embeddings and fine-tuning that assumes you already know how to code. Most people are somewhere in the middle—capable, curious, but without a clear path forward.
Nerdsmith exists to fill that gap. We teach AI fluency: not just what buttons to press, but how to think about AI as a tool that fits into your actual work and life. The goal isn't to turn you into an AI expert. It's to help you use AI naturally, the same way you use your phone or your email—without thinking about it as a separate skill.
What makes us different is that we work on real problems. Not hypothetical scenarios or practice exercises, but the actual things you're trying to accomplish on a Tuesday morning.
The Story
This started because I kept having the same conversation.
Friends, family, colleagues would ask me about AI. They'd seen the headlines, tried ChatGPT once or twice, maybe watched a YouTube video. But they couldn't figure out how to make it actually useful. "I asked it to help with X and it just gave me generic garbage." Or: "I don't even know what I'd use it for."
The turning point was a coffee shop conversation with a small business owner. She'd tried to use AI to write her website copy, got frustrated after two attempts, and concluded "AI isn't good at this stuff." But I'd seen people use AI for exactly that task with great results. The difference wasn't the tool—it was knowing how to use it.
That's when I realized the barrier isn't information. There are thousands of AI tutorials online. The barrier is translation. People need someone to show them how AI applies to their specific situation, in language that makes sense, with examples that feel relevant.
What We Believe
AI should make your actual life better, not just your LinkedIn posts.
Most AI content focuses on productivity hacks for knowledge workers. We think AI is just as useful for planning family dinners, helping with homework, or organizing a move.
You can learn complex things without being talked down to.
You're not stupid. You just haven't had someone explain this clearly. We skip the jargon without dumbing down the concepts.
Fluency looks different for different people.
A teacher, a freelance designer, and a software developer all need different AI skills. We meet you where you are, not where some generic curriculum assumes you should be.
You don't need to understand how AI works to use it well.
You probably can't explain how your car engine works, but you drive just fine. Same principle applies here.
Knowing when NOT to use AI is as important as knowing when to use it.
AI isn't magic. Some tasks it's great at, some it's mediocre at, some it makes worse. We'll teach you to recognize the difference.
Learning should feel like progress, not homework.
Every lesson ends with something you can actually use. No theory for theory's sake.
About the Founder
I didn't set out to teach people about AI.
A year ago, I was just curious. I'd been hearing about ChatGPT and Claude and wanted to see what the fuss was about. I started playing around, mostly for work stuff—drafting emails, summarizing documents, brainstorming ideas. Some of it was impressive. A lot of it was disappointing.
But I kept going. I read everything I could find, watched tutorials, experimented with different approaches. Slowly, things started to click. I figured out why some prompts worked and others didn't. I learned which tools were actually useful versus just hyped.
And then people started asking me questions.
What became Nerdsmith started as a Google Doc I shared with friends titled "How I Actually Use AI." It grew from there.
My approach is documentation-as-we-go. Every challenge I encounter, every workflow I develop, every mistake I make gets documented and shared. That means the content here reflects real learning experiences, not sanitized tutorials.
Whether you're a teacher trying to understand student AI use, a professional drowning in admin work, or someone who thinks "AI isn't for people like me," there's a place for you here.