About the Founder/Architect

My name is Andy Moore, and I have taught IB Global Politics, History, and English at Ashbury College in Ottawa, Ontario since 1996. I am the owner and operator of CustomAILab Learning Systems Inc. Throughout my professional career, I have always held a deep fascination and passion for educational technology use in the classroom.

In December of 2022, I got my first glimpse of ChatGPT, an experience that made me realize that the educational landscape had just experienced a seismic shift, and that I was going to have to change my teaching and assessment methods in response to the changes that were coming. I soon learned that, like all powerful technical tools, artificial intelligence presented tremendous opportunities for teaching and learning. However, it also brought with it a number of dangerous traps for students and teachers alike. For students, it has provided a quick and easy method to complete almost any type of academic assignment — in these cases, the LLM becomes a substitute for learning. For teachers, it has the potential to fully automate lesson planning and even grading — in these cases, it can become a substitute for good teaching.

Since 2022, I have seen the newer models ‘hallucinate’ less, and get much better at the tasks that make them valuable to a humanities teacher, such as compiling bibliographies, translating sources, taking notes, and identifying gaps and debates in the current scholarship. However, these models have also brought significant unwanted baggage with them. They were (and still are) willing to do my students’ assignments for them. They also have a tendency to use flattery as a way of keeping my students engaged and on their site. Maybe you’ve noticed that your questions seem to get a lot smarter when you chat with an LLM? Another engagement trick the models frequently use is asking follow up questions that distract students and take them down irrelevant and time consuming paths. I’ve found that enlisting the aid of ‘the chatbot’ to assist with research and learning can be very productive, but it can also be very distracting.

As I became more interested in how to get the most out of this powerful new tool, I began reading articles on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). This research has led me to experiment with a variety of different types of ‘agents’, ‘GPTs’, ‘Projects’, and ‘Gems’ over the past few years. The culmination of that research and experimentation is available here in the form of Cal, The Librarian, and The Dean. Together, they create an online learning environment that puts to use the best of what LLMs have to offer, while leaving behind the commercial baggage that can make them harmful. Much of what I have learned from 30 years of teaching at one of Canada’s best independent schools has gone into their creation, and I hope that if you’ve read this far, you might be willing to go a little further and try them out.

Warm Regards,

Andy Moore

January 1st, 2026