Week 2 — Working with AI

Context, prompting, and determinism. Aug 31–Sep 6.

This week

• Lecture 2 — Working with AI: Context, Prompting, and Determinism
  The full lecture deck, with a self-check on most slides and the Ask AI tutor built in. Open it before the session or work through it afterwards.
• Lab 2 — Direct an AI to Clean a Dataset
  Clean a messy journal-entry export by hand, then write the specification that gets an AI to do the same job. 100 points, due Tuesday, September 8.

Reference and practice

• Lab 2 Output Validator
  Upload your cleaned CSV and it checks for the mistakes a cleaning script usually makes: leftover header rows, page-break junk, and an Amount column still stored as text.
• Encoding primer
  What an encoding is and why this week's file is not the usual UTF-8. Read it if the file looks strange in your text editor, or if your script cannot load it.
• pandas primer
  A short, plain-language reference for reading the script the AI builds. You are not asked to write pandas, only to recognize what it is doing.
• Pivot table practice
  A short interactive for the pivot table you need in Part 1 and again in Homework 2.