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The 5 Principles of Effective AI Prompting - AI Foundations Day 3

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Conversation Management

5:38 with Travis Alstrand

Why long conversations degrade, the one-conversation-per-task rule, and five ways to give AI reference material: pasting text, pasting error messages, sharing screenshots, uploading files, and project-level context. Plus how to carry your progress into a fresh chat without losing anything.

Vocabulary

  • Context window — The limit on how much an AI can hold in mind at once. Like a whiteboard: as a chat grows, the earliest material gets erased, which is why long conversations start to drift.
  • Debugging — Figuring out why something isn't working. Being able to say whether it's a front-end, back-end, API, or database problem is what makes it fast.
  • Markdown — A simple plain-text formatting syntax — # for headings, - for bullets, ** for bold. It's how AI tools format their answers, and a compact way to structure your own prompts.

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    This is a skill nobody teaches, and it's the difference between productive AI 0:00
    sessions and going in circles. 0:02
    Long conversations get messy and AI loses track. 0:05
    Every AI conversation has a context window, a limit on how much it can hold in 0:09
    its memory at once. 0:15
    Think of it like a whiteboard. 0:17
    early in the conversation, everything you've said is on the board, but as the 0:18
    conversation gets longer, the older stuff starts getting erased to make room. 0:23
    This means long conversations degrade. AI starts forgetting what you said 0:27

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