Meet Le Chat — what it is and who makes it

The concept

Le Chat is a fast European assistant with an unusually open model line behind it made by Mistral AI. The models behind it are the Mistral model line, from small models that fit on a laptop to larger hosted ones, many of them open-weight. None of that matters on its own — what matters is that you know what kind of worker you have hired. At speed and efficiency — short answers, quick work, document handling, and running on modest hardware is the job you hand it. At depth: on the hardest reasoning tasks it is not the strongest model, and it knows it is the job you keep.

Most people come to a course like this expecting a list of magic words. There is no such list. What there is, is a tool that produces quick, well-organised answers with the documents you gave it kept in view, and produces it at a speed no human matches — which means the skill is not in writing the prompt, it is in knowing what a good answer looks like so you can tell the difference.

Here is the first thing to try, worded the way you will word things for the rest of the course:

Read the answer twice. The first read is for the content; the second is for the shape — did it answer the question you asked, or the question it found easiest? That second read is the habit this whole course is built on.

I need to turn a 20-page PDF of a college timetable into a clean table I can import. Tell me exactly what to send you, what format to ask for, and what will go wrong with a scanned page.