You Can Build Software Now

And you should. In fact, you must. Just try it... please... before someone else makes you...

Trust me, I avoided programming for 13 years. It was always tedious, complicated, and everyone else was better at it than me.

I knew it was powerful. So I learnt just enough to talk the talk, but never enough to walk the walk.

Knowing the talk was enough to make me one of the most valuable early employees at Scale AI, as the only semi-technical member of the GTM org (with prod write access for scripting). So much so that Jon hired Shaun to build a team of "better Andys" essentially. I'm happy Cat was patient enough to walk my noob butt thru setting up corp in weeks 1-2, and that all these friends have since gotten rich!

But the part of me that sucked at software was the same part that resigned without vesting any stock. In a word, I was immature and impatient.

I studied computer science at MIT, but I focused mainly on the fun parts of the math theory and algorithms, so I never built the hard skills to make coding worth my while. I legitimately hated it. I used to hire people to do it for me. Even though I worked in "tech", I stuck to ops roles. I filed tickets for poor Calvin and co to crush. I seriously refused to do software engineering at all, across multiple previous jobs and companies, despite every possible opportunity...

But things have changed. Within the last few months. A lot. So now, I enjoy doing it! This is a massive shift. Happening literally RIGHT NOW.

13 years of my life, poof!!

I'm bad at explaining sometimes, especially when I'm excited, so you really don't have to take it from me... Check out what these other people wrote instead please:

• The Great Transition
• Something Big Is Happening
• Another Great Transition
• Rent A Human (dot) ai
• A-Z.md and their $2M fundraise (i replied + they replied)
• guy's AI makes $40k+ BY ITSELF in one month (wtf)

If you are a brain with eyeballs reading this, know that brains with eyeballs no longer own the future. Maybe for the next 10 years, brains with eyeballs who use AI tools will still be on top. But very quickly the AI tools are taking on lives of their own.

This is no longer a metaphor. It is reality.

And it's really not that hard to get up to speed. THE ONLY PREREQUISITE IS READING AND WRITING ENGLISH.

OK, maybe you need some basic computer skills, like downloading an app and signing up to stuff using your email. But really, again, it's truly not that hard! You will thank me in 6-18 months, or fewer, if you push through it.

I highly recommend trying Claude Code in a folder on your desktop. $20/mo is more than enough to start. You can be very gentle and tentative at first. "Claude please contain yourself to this folder and don't mess up my machine" etc. It will walk you through things as needed. Intelligence is smart, regardless of artificiality.

Build me tic-tac-toe. Build me a recipe book for square mango cakes with pictures and nutrition facts. Build me a bot which trades stocks or bets on Kalshi...

You can download Visual Studio for free, if you prefer seeing files versus using terminal or command line. This is like a "Microsoft Word" application that Claude Code can live within as your "Clippy" assistant. You can ask your preferred AI how to set things up: Gemini, Grok, chatGPT, doesn't matter.

If you don't have a blog or personal website yet, that's always a good starting project! You can get a website running in 10 minutes and don't even need Claude Code for it.

I'm personally making lots of github repos and hooking them up to Cloudflare workers, but if any of these terms are unfamiliar, just start wherever is easy and fun and interesting to you. Mac Mini not required. I've heard Vercel works well. Zo looks cool.

You will be surprised how quickly a week or two of 20 minutes per day playing in your sandbox compounds.

Have you ever thought about your 3 wishes if you met a genie, like for real? Money, fame, longevity, happiness, purpose, extra quality time with loved ones, infinitely more wishes...

Turns out the genie is here now, no joke! 🧞

and YOU are both wizard and the bottle(neck) 🪔