Take the Practicum with you
The Practicum lives on this site, but it is easier to work with where you already think — inside your own AI assistant. This page has the files and five short recipes for loading them. Checked: 2026-09. Assistants change their rules and limits; look at the date.
A pack is every material for one book in a single file: worksheets, prompts and agent skills. You load it once, then simply ask: "sort my week into the three baskets", "build my 90-day plan", "check this process against the gates". The assistant answers from the method of the book instead of from whatever it absorbed on the open web.
Draft translation, not author-reviewed. The Russian edition is the source of truth. Every page inside the English packs carries the same note until the author signs it off.
Files
| Pack | What is inside | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Book 1 — The Human Edge | the workbook plus 24 materials: value levers, the week in baskets, levels of usefulness, your personal system, the five deficits, cognitive debt, the 90-day plan | ~91 KB |
| Book 2 — Business in the Age of AI Agents | the workbook plus 25 materials: process maturity, the agent contract, change gates, the small-business staff map, visibility to an agent buyer | ~97 KB |
| Book 3 — The Economics of Trust | the workbook plus 11 materials: the trust compass, the perimeter, chain of custody, the evidence package, an honest AI policy | ~68 KB |
| All three books | everything together | ~250 KB |
| Skills only | six ready instructions for an AI assistant, without the worksheets — fits in a message box when you cannot attach a file | ~18 KB |
The file opens in the browser. To keep it: right-click → Save as… (on a phone, Share → Save to Files).
The format is Markdown (.md) — plain text with headings. Assistants read it as it is. If a service
insists on .txt, rename the file; nothing about the content changes.
The living layer is deliberately not in the pack. Tool maps, what to learn now, market reads — anything carrying a check date goes stale faster than a downloaded file. Read those on the live pages.
Five recipes
1. A project in ChatGPT
A Project is a folder with its own memory and its own files: whatever you put there is visible in every chat inside it.
- Create a project and name it after the book: "Practicum, Book 1".
- Attach the pack file to the project.
- Put one line in the project instructions: "Answer from this material. If the answer is not in the file, say so instead of inventing one."
- Start at step 1 of the workbook.
2. A project in Claude
Same move: create a project, add the file to Project knowledge, and ask it in the instructions to
stay with the material. Claude takes large files whole, so all.md works too.
3. NotebookLM
Add the pack as a Source and ask away. NotebookLM answers only from the sources you loaded and shows where each answer came from — useful precisely when you want to check that nothing was invented.
4. Any assistant that accepts an attachment
Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Qwen and most others take a file the same way: attach it, say "this is the method, we work from it", then ask the workbook questions one at a time.
If the file is refused or truncated, do not fight it — take one page instead. Every page of the
Practicum has a Markdown twin at its own address with .md on the end, for example
https://cheap-intelligence.vercel.app/en/playbooks/week-inventory.md. And copy-pasting the section
you need always works.
5. Codex, Claude Code and other agents in a folder
Put the file next to your working files and point to it in the task. Individual skills
(SKILL.md) go into your agent's skills folder: it picks them up on its own when a task falls into
their area. How such a file is built, and how to write your own —
Turn a habit into a skill.
Two things worth remembering
Do not hand over more than you need. The pack holds none of your data — you add that yourself as you fill the worksheets in. Anything you send to a cloud service has left your control: keep personal data, trade secrets, passwords and material under NDA out of it. If the task genuinely needs them, strip the identifying details first.
A pack is a snapshot, not a subscription. It does not update itself. Material changes: download it again once a quarter, or check against the site. The verification dates travel inside the file — those are what to look at.
Practicum texts are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; code and browser tools are MIT. When you cite the material, name the author, the Practicum, the page address and its check date.