What kind of way of being, cultivated through working with AI, creates empowered humans who make wiser decisions at scale?
A new kind of AI training company. We offer workshops and a course on using LLMs as an extension of cognition. Built for empowerment. Held with wisdom.
Most AI training picks one side. The work is in holding both.
Purely technical.
Here’s how to prompt. Here’s the framework. Here’s the toolchain. The human questions never make it into the room.
Purely philosophical.
Here’s why to worry. Here’s what it’s doing to us. Real questions. The craft of actually using these tools never makes it into the room either.
Rigorous craft and human judgment, in the same room.
The actual practice of using these tools well. The discernment to see what they’re doing to your thinking. Principles that hold when the prompts and frameworks change.
The model has no ground truth, no metacognition, and no genuine understanding of your situation. Everything it produces is a sophisticated approximation shaped entirely by its inputs.
- Hallucination it approximates facts it doesn’t have
- Sycophancy it approximates what you want to hear
- Frame capture it approximates within whatever reality you’ve described
- Drift approximations feed back in and compound
One idea, the whole picture. When a team understands this as a working mental model, the rest of the craft follows. They know why to verify. Why to invite challenge. Why context matters. Why to check early in long outputs.
Four ways into the work.
- 01 Half-day · Mixed teams · leadership orientation
Foundations
How LLMs actually work
A clear mental model of what's happening inside these tools, why they fail, and what to do about it. The single underlying idea is sophisticated approximation. Every failure mode flows from it.
- 02 Half- or full-day · Teams already using AI who want to use it well
From Prompting to Systems
The spectrum from one-off prompt to organisational capability
Prompt → reusable prompt → chain → automation → assistant → system. Where you are, where to go next, and how to encode individual expertise into organisational capability without losing judgment along the way.
- 03 Half-day · C-suite & leadership teams making AI decisions
Sovereign Adoption
AI stewardship for leadership
How to steward AI adoption in your organisation without sleepwalking through it. Skill atrophy, automation complacency, the productivity perception gap, governance, and what to protect now.
- 04 Half-day · Knowledge workers, L&D teams, heavy AI users
AI as Mirror
Metacognition and discernment for knowledge workers
AI reflects your assumptions, paradigm, and frame back at you. A workshop using the tool itself to surface how it shapes your thinking, and to build the habits that keep your judgment sharp.
A course on using LLMs as an extension of cognition.
Two tracks. One for engineers. One for everyone else. Evergreen, radically transparent. Built from the same conviction that runs through the workshops: the paradigm of the user creates the output.
Hi, I’m Nick.
I’m the founder of Depth First. Software engineer, software trainer for the better part of a decade, and a coach with a deep practice in transformational connection.
This unusual mix of technical competence and relational depth is what Depth First is built on. Most AI training is one or the other. The wise use of these tools needs both.
More about meCurious whether this fits your team?
A 30-minute call. No pitch. We’ll talk about what you’re trying to make happen and see if anything we do fits.