Learning Together

Welcome back

Welcome to Talk to Walk, your go-to newsletter empowering small business owners with clear, actionable AI insights to boost your success from day one!

Its the dog days of summer, and the team at Talk to Walk is currently focused on vacation and family. We hope you are making the most of the summer too. With your Thursday coffee, read up on a new list of tips and stories to help you walk.

Prompt of the week: Teach me

I’ve had aspirations to build a video game from scratch for over a decade now.

Unfortunately, I’m not particularly technical. I didn’t grow up coding. My previous attempts (three or four in total) fizzled out somewhere between “This is harder than I thought” and “I have no idea why this isn’t working.”

But then came ChatGPT.

When I first started using AI to help me build a game, it felt like magic. I’d describe what I wanted “a 2D character controller,” or “an enemy that patrols and attacks,” and out came code, neatly packaged and ready to paste into Unity. The pace was exhilarating.

But the results? Disastrous.

Everything it built worked fine in isolation. A character controller here. An enemy AI there. But when I tried to stitch them together, nothing worked. The game fell apart under its own weight, and worse, I didn’t know how to fix it. The code wasn’t mine.

So I started over.

This time, I approached it differently. I didn’t ask AI to build things for me, I asked it to explain things to me.

Line by line, term by term, I had it break down the code. What does Vector2 mean? Why use FixedUpdate instead of Update? How would I implement a cooldown timer? What’s the best way to refactor this messy logic?

What I discovered was that AI became less of a code generator and more of a real-time tutor. Always patient. Always available. Always explaining things in a way that made sense to me not a senior developer on Stack Overflow.

And it changed everything.

Not only did I start learning how to code, but I also began making better design decisions. When I hit a wall, I wasn’t just pasting in another script I was diagnosing and fixing the issue. I understood how things were stitched together. The confidence boost was real.

I still believe that, one day soon, AI might be able to build an entire game from scratch with minimal input. And I imagine many will do it that way.

But game design is messy. You rarely know what your final game will look like when you start. You try something, mess it up, and realize, wait, this version is more fun anyway. That’s part of the magic. And that kind of discovery doesn't come from autopilot.

So here’s my TL;DR:

Instead of asking AI to do the work for you, try asking it to teach you how to do the work.

It’ll still be faster than learning sol,o and it’ll take you much further in the long run.

“How to” of the Week: Make it a tutor

AI can generate emails, reports, strategies, you name it. But if you always treat it like a vending machine, you miss the bigger opportunity: growing your own skills faster than ever before.

Here’s how to flip the script and use ChatGPT as a tutor, not just a task-doer:

1. Start with your outcome.
   “I need to write a proposal for a new pricing model.”

2. Ask for structure, not the final product.
   “What should a pricing proposal include?”
   “What objections should I be ready to answer?”

3. Request line-by-line explanations.
   “Can you explain why this paragraph is persuasive?”
   “What tone are you using here, and why?”

4. Pause to reflect and revise.
   Don’t just accept the first draft. Edit it. Ask why edits matter. You’ll get better every time.

5. Apply what you’ve learned next time.
   Use what you just picked up to write the next one yourself—with AI as your proofreader or strategist.

That’s all for now.

Got an idea we should chase next? A favorite tool we should test? We read every suggestion.

And if you’re not subscribed yet... well, what are you waiting for? Come walk with us.

Catch you soon,
The Talk to Walk team