In April 2023, Robert Scales published A Beginner's Guide to ChatGPT, which reached #1 in Amazon's artificial intelligence category. Since then, AI has changed almost every month: new models, agents, image and video tools, new rules. A printed book can't keep up with that pace. So we designed The Guide to Artificial Intelligence, a free bilingual site that carries the book's method forward and keeps it current.
What problem does the guide solve?
There is no shortage of information about AI, but it is scattered, often undated and rarely checkable. Someone who simply wants to use ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini better at work has to sort through announcements, videos and opinions. The guide instead answers the questions people actually ask, one at a time, with a short answer, examples to copy and sources you can check.
How is the guide organized?
Each article starts with a question and answers it in two sentences, then explains with examples. It ends with the question that naturally comes next, so you can act on it. Every article is dated and backed by two or three sources, official sources first.
- More than 750 articles per language, in English and French, from 2019 to today.
- Eight topics: prompting, building with AI (APIs, agents, automation), the OpenAI tracker, models and labs (Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek and others), image, video, music and voice tools, the book's method, the history of AI, and society and work.
- Three paths to start: use AI, work with AI, build with AI.
What tools does the guide offer?
The tools run entirely in the browser: no account, no data sent, no call to an AI model.
- The Prompt Builder: pick what you're making (an everyday task, a hard problem, a deep research brief, an agent brief, standing instructions, a Claude Skill, an image or a video clip), answer a few questions and the tool writes the prompt. An eight-point check shows what is missing, with a link to the article that explains why.
- A searchable library of 586 prompts taken from the articles.
- An 87-term glossary, in English and French.
- A printable seven-point checklist to verify an AI answer before you use it.
What else is on the site?
- An AI timeline of 315 events, from the automata of ancient myth to this month's models, each dated and linked to its source. The data is published as open data (CC BY 4.0 licence).
- A download library: the prompt library, glossary and timeline as JSON, plus a free 29-page PDF guide for subscribers to the weekly newsletter.
- A page for the book's readers, gathering everything the printed QR code promised.
- A shop of Claude Skills and tools written by Robert Scales, sold by Holistic Hybrid. The guide itself stays entirely free.
How is the site built?
The guide follows the same method as our client sites and La Petite Nation, on infrastructure of its own:
- a Python static site generator that produces close to 1,600 pages, each language with its own addresses;
- hosting on Cloudflare, with strict security headers (content security policy, HTTPS enforced);
- a double opt-in newsletter on its own database, protected from bots by Cloudflare Turnstile;
- the Display accessibility panel on every page (text size, high contrast, easy-to-read font, reading guide, stop animations), with WCAG 2.2 AA as the target;
- quality checks before every publication: no passage copied from a source, nothing newer than the article's date, two or three sources per article, and an SEO audit;
- an llms.txt file and a text version of every article, so search engines and AI tools cite the guide correctly.
What does this project show for a local business?
The same principles apply to a business or non-profit website: answer your customers' real questions clearly, date and source your information, make the site accessible to everyone and secure it from day one. If you want a site built this way, get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
Is the guide free?
Yes. All articles, tools, the timeline and the downloads are free, with no paid subscription. Only the shop products are paid.
Is the guide available in French?
Yes. Every article, tool and page exists in English and French, with translated addresses.
Who publishes the guide?
The guide is written by Robert Scales and published by Holistic Hybrid Inc., in Montpellier, Quebec. Petite Nation Numérique handled its design and development.