The manual

About

A numbered manual for AI tools: 105 short guides across 15 topics, each one ending in something you can copy.

What this is

Official docs are scattered and dry; a video makes you watch twenty minutes for three commands. Every guide here is 2–4 minutes long and gets to the point. 67 of the 105 end in a shell command you can paste. The rest end in the thing you actually needed instead: a config file, a prompt, an exact click-path, or — for the comparisons — a recommendation.

The subjects are the tools people are actually wiring together right now: Claude Code, MCP servers, ChatGPT, Cursor, local models through Ollama and LM Studio, and the prompting habits that make any of them behave.

How it's numbered

Everything is numbered like plates in a manual. The first pair of digits is the topic — 01 Install & set up through 15 Building with the API — and the second is the guide's position inside that topic, in publication order. So 05.02 is guide 2 of topic 5, MCP: Connect Claude Code to GitHub with MCP.

Numbers do not shift. New guides are appended to the end of their topic, so a plate number you wrote down keeps pointing at the same guide.

Three ways in, depending on what you know: the 15 topics if you know the tool, the registry if you know a word from the title, and 7 curated paths — Get running, Make Claude Code yours, Run models locally, Prompt like a pro, Build with the Claude API, Serve models yourself, Try the other coding agents — if you would rather be told what to read next. The first of those is the “Start here” link in the header.

How to move around it

How it pays for itself

Everything is free and there is no sign-up. Some outbound links — hosting, cloud GPUs, AI API providers — may be affiliate links, which is the whole of the business model; the disclosure spells out what that does and does not change.

↑↓ move↵ openalt+↵ copy first command

Keyboard

⌘/ctrl+K or /
Search all guides
alt+↵
In search: copy the guide's first command
j / k
Move through a list of guides
c
On a guide: copy its first command
t
Toggle light / dark
?
This list