The Edge
Issue #001 | April 6, 2026
◆ This week
01 A $55K/year school just opened in Chicago with zero teachers — AI handles the classroom, and it's already dividing the education world. 02 Zuckerberg is building a personal AI agent to help him run Meta — and employees already have their own. 03 Anthropic quietly launched 13+ free courses on AI — with certificates — and almost nobody is talking about it. 04 This week's Workshop: one small addition to any AI prompt that visibly changes the quality of what you get back — with a real before/after.

AI News

A School With No Teachers Just Opened in Chicago — And AI Runs the Classroom

Students in a classroom setting

Alpha School is opening a campus in Chicago this fall. No teachers. Students do their core subjects — math, science, reading — through AI software in about two hours a day, then spend the rest of the time with human "guides" doing workshops in public speaking, coding, outdoor ed. Tuition is $55K a year. They're already running 22 campuses in other states with over 1,000 students, and they're expanding to 35+ locations. Whether this specific model works long-term or not, it tells you something about where education is headed and what the next generation of workers is going to expect when they show up to your company.

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Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent to Help Him Run Meta

Modern tech office environment

Zuckerberg is reportedly building a personal AI agent to help him do his job as CEO — pulling up information fast without having to go through layers of people and reports, analyzing data, streamlining decisions. Meta employees are already using internal tools along the same lines: one called "Second Brain" that finds and organizes documents, and another called "My Claw" — a personalized AI agent that can actually talk to other agents. Zuckerberg's quote on where this is going: "We're elevating individual contributors and flattening teams." The goal is to use AI to collapse Meta's org structure and move faster. If the CEO of a $1.5 trillion company is using AI to skip management layers, that's a signal worth paying attention to.

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Anthropic Just Made Their AI Education Completely Free

Person learning online at a computer

Anthropic — the company that builds Claude — launched something called Anthropic Academy. It's 13+ free courses, self-paced, with certificates when you finish. There's a track for people who just want to get better at using AI day to day (no technical skills needed), one for developers who want to build with the API, and one for enterprise cloud stuff. The non-technical track is where most people should start. You don't need a paid account. You sign up with an email and go. If you've been meaning to actually learn this stuff instead of just poking around, this is the best free option out there right now.

Browse courses free →

The Workshop

Chain of Thought
4 MIN · WEEK 1 OF 52

So there's this thing called chain of thought reasoning. Sounds technical, but it's really not. All it means is: if you tell the AI to think through something step by step before it answers, the output gets noticeably better. More structured, more complete, less hand-wavy.

That's it. You add "think through this step by step" to whatever you're asking, and you get a different quality of answer back. Not a little different. I ran the same prompt both ways below using "compound interest" as the topic. See for yourself.

Example 1 — Standard Prompt
The Prompt
I want to understand compound interest well enough to actually use it.
I'm at a beginner level.
Teach me the core idea, show me a real example, and tell me what most people get wrong.
What the AI gave back ↓
Compound interest is when you earn interest on both your original deposit and on the interest that has already been added. For example, if you invest $1,000 at 5% annual interest, after one year you'd have $1,050, and in the second year you'd earn interest on $1,050 instead of $1,000. The most common mistake people make is not starting to invest early enough, since compound interest works best over long periods of time.
Fine. Technically correct. But flat. You'd read it, nod, and forget it by tomorrow.
Example 2 — With "Step by Step"
The Prompt
I want to understand compound interest well enough to actually use it.
I'm at a beginner level.
Think through this step by step, then teach me the core idea,
show me a real example, and tell me what most people get wrong.
What the AI gave back ↓
The core idea: Compound interest means your money earns returns on its returns. Simple interest pays you only on your original amount. Compound interest pays you on the original plus everything it's already earned. That's the entire difference, and over time, it's enormous.

Real example: You invest $1,000 at 5% annual interest, compounded yearly.
  Year 1: $1,000 × 1.05 = $1,050
  Year 2: $1,050 × 1.05 = $1,102.50
  Year 10: $1,628.89
  Year 30: $4,321.94


You put in $1,000. You got back $4,321. $3,321 of that was interest earning interest. The growth isn't linear. It's a curve that accelerates.

What most people get wrong: They focus on the rate and ignore the time. The difference between starting at 25 vs. 35 is bigger than the difference between a 5% and 8% return. They also forget that compound interest works against them on debt. Credit card balances grow the same way, just in the wrong direction.

The more you use these tools, the more you start to notice what makes a good output vs. a lazy one. This is one of those small things that makes a big difference.

Try it on something you're actually working through. DM me on LinkedIn what you used it on.

AI Resources Worth Bookmarking

Three tools worth having in your toolkit.
Anthropic Academy
Free AI courses from the team behind Claude. Certificates included.
anthropic.skilljar.com →
Claude
Exceptionally strong for long documents, nuanced writing, and multi-step reasoning.
claude.ai →
ChatGPT
The most widely used AI assistant. Great starting point for almost any task.
chatgpt.com →