I Hardly Remember Anything

Last updated: October 2026

Three lessons in, I opened the call the way I usually do, by asking what he had done since the last one.

"Nothing. Nothing."

He said it twice. The second time was quieter, and then he explained himself without being asked. A demanding job, a young family, and more going on at home this year than usual. The week had gone the way his weeks go.

None of that was new to me, and none of it was an excuse. What was new was the reason he gave next, which had nothing to do with time.

It matters who he is, because it changes how the sentence lands. He is not a beginner. He had been using AI chat tools nearly every day for about a year before he ever booked a lesson, and the line he wrote when he first got in touch was that he felt he was not very good at it and wanted to learn to use it properly. A year of daily use, a paid subscription, and a standing sense of falling short. That is a more common profile than the total beginner, and in my experience it is the one that gets stuck hardest.

He had asked me to record the lessons

The recordings were his idea. He wanted them so he could go back over things, which is a reasonable request and I said yes immediately and uploaded them for him privately.

I should have known what would happen, because I have watched it happen before. Nobody rewatches an hour of themselves being taught. To find the forty seconds where we set something up, you have to scrub through the whole thing, and you have to do it at the exact moment you are already frustrated by being stuck. The request for a recording is really a request for a way back in. The recording is a poor one.

I write timestamps into the description of every recording, which felt like enough when I started doing it. It is not, and the reason is simple. Timestamps help someone who has already decided to go looking. Nothing was prompting him to go looking, because you cannot search for the thing you have forgotten you learned.

There was another signal I had been misreading for three weeks. At the end of each of the first three lessons I had sent him a prompt to run during the week, with some version of "tell me how it goes". Three times, nothing came back. I had filed that under busy.

When I pushed a little on the call, he gave me the actual reason.

"I hardly remember anything."

He was not being self-deprecating. He said it flatly, the way you would report the weather. Two full lessons had happened, he had been present and engaged for both, and by the following week almost none of it was reachable.

Some of the people I teach cannot easily read or watch their way back into something, for reasons that have nothing to do with effort or interest, and it took me longer than it should have to stop treating that as a motivation problem. I had been trying to buy him practice time he did not have. The real constraint was that every lesson was landing in a week that would empty it out by Tuesday.

What fixed it was a file, not a discipline

The following lesson I opened with something that takes about ninety seconds to explain.

Take the transcript of the session. Put it in a Claude project, in a folder called something like Lessons. Then, instead of rewatching anything, ask it questions. What did we say about writing prompts? How do I get my site live again? What was the command for that? It answers from the transcript in two or three lines, and you never open the video at all.

If you have never used one, a project is a folder inside Claude with files attached to it, and everything in that folder is available to every conversation you start there. Drop the transcript in and an hour of teaching becomes searchable in plain English. Nothing to install, nothing to configure, and no cost beyond the subscription he had already been paying for a year, which matters more than it sounds for someone who was not sure that subscription was earning its keep.

His reaction was the most enthusiastic I had seen from him in four lessons. He said it was clever, twice, and then he tried it while I watched.

The reason it works is that it changes the job. Remembering is a job you have to do on a schedule, when you have no reason to, on a week when a lot else is happening. Retrieving is a job you do at the exact moment you want the answer, which is the only moment the answer is worth anything. It is also completely passive between sessions, which suits a person whose honest capacity for homework is zero.

It is the same instruction I give about AI tools generally, pointed at the student instead of the task: stop carrying context in your head, and put it somewhere the model can read it. The machine-facing version of this is a handoff file that lets a fresh session pick up where the last one stopped, and I had been teaching that for months without noticing that people need one too.

I do not think this is one student. It is the same shape as the thing that happens to almost everyone who signs up for a course and quietly stops, and the completion numbers on those courses are grim for reasons that have very little to do with the material being hard. The gap between sessions is where learning goes to die, and nobody designs for it. We design the sessions.

It also rhymes with something I wrote about a student who was convinced one request would break her whole site. She was not short of ability either. In both cases the thing slowing a capable adult down was not the tool, and in both cases it was invisible until somebody asked one direct question.

What I tell every student now

I have stopped leaving homework. Either the work happens in the session, with me watching, or it does not happen, and pretending otherwise just moves the failure to a week where I cannot see it. If something needs to run between lessons, we start it on the call while the person is still on the screen.

Then, before anything else gets taught, we set up the way back in. A project with the transcripts in it. Notes, if they take notes. Screenshots of whatever they are trying to do next. It costs a couple of minutes at the end of a session and it converts every future lesson from something you have to hold onto into something you can look up.

The question I now ask before I let anyone off a call is not whether they understood. It is what they think they will want to look up on Thursday, and whether they know where it will be when they go looking.

If you have been using AI tools for a year and still feel like you are not very good at it, I would look here before I looked at your prompting. Retention between sessions is the real constraint on learning a tool, not the tool's difficulty. Almost nobody is failing at AI because the software is hard. They are failing because week three has no memory of week two, and they blame themselves for it.

He is building something real now, across sessions rather than inside them, and the change was not effort. It was a file he asks questions instead of a video he never opened.

If that sounds like your last year with these tools, it is worth an hour rather than another twelve months: book a free Discovery Call and tell me what you can remember from the last thing you tried to learn.

Written by Michael Murr for AI Tutor Code: private 1-on-1 online tutoring for professionals learning Python, AI tools, Data Science, ML, and LLM engineering. 200+ students taught, 3,000+ hours delivered.