People ask me this a lot, usually a little sheepishly, like it's a dumb question: "which AI tool should I actually use?" It's not a dumb question — there are a handful of well-known ones now, and none of them explain themselves well to a first-timer.
Here's how I'd think about it if I were choosing again from scratch, as someone who came into this with zero technical background. You want something that reads and writes like a person, not something built to feel like a search engine or a coding tool. You want something that lets you have an actual back-and-forth conversation, where you can say "that's not quite it, try again" and it understands what you mean. And you want something that doesn't bury useful features behind settings menus full of unexplained switches.
That's why I teach Claude, made by Anthropic. It's not the only AI assistant out there, but it's the one that felt the most like talking to a genuinely patient, well-read person rather than operating a piece of software. For someone starting at zero, that difference is everything — it's the gap between quitting after ten minutes and actually sticking with it.
Whatever tool you land on, the real skill is the same: plain questions, real situations, patience with a few wrong turns. On Ramp AI teaches that skill using Claude specifically. Here's a look at it.