why I write these
Three years. $14,000 in debt. No one to ask.
I taught myself to code, without a computer science degree, and got a job as a developer. Eleven months in, the company went under. So I decided to build my own thing. But three years (counting the year before that job) and a pile of apps later, not one of them had helped a real person.
Everyone said “learn AI,” so I paid for the tools and burned through tokens. But nobody could tell me what to do, or in what order. When I got stuck, there was no one to ask. The whole time, I was scared AI would take my job.
That left me in my thirties, about $14,000 in debt, working café shifts to get by.
But those three years taught me one thing: how to get unstuck on my own. So this time I'm making something that helps. Every time I work out how to get something real done with AI, I write down the steps. I run every step myself and keep only what works.
Maybe you're paying for AI and have nothing to show for it. Maybe you get stuck and have no one to ask. That was me. You shouldn't have to go through that. Let me get stuck first.