Can’t code. Not a developer.
I’ve used ChatGPT for over two years. Ask a question, get a code block. Copy it. Paste it in the terminal. Error. Copy the error. Ask again. Get another code block. Paste. Error.
Never escaped that loop.
Once I tried making a Python script to clean up Excel files. Took three hours. Didn’t understand a single line. It ran. But I had no idea why. Next time I tried it on a different file, it didn’t run. Another three hours.
That was my “coding with AI.” Copy-paste → error → copy-paste → error → give up.
Heard about vibe coding. Some guy named Karpathy coined it.
Didn’t know exactly what it was. But people were saying “you can build apps without knowing code.” Watched some videos. Looked real.
Heard about Claude Code. Runs in the terminal. Installed it.
First time I opened it, I typed “make me a to-do app” out of habit.
With ChatGPT, this is where the code block shows up. Copy that, save it somewhere, figure out how to run it… The loop begins.
But something different happened. Instead of showing me code, it made the files directly.
I watched files appear in the terminal. Folders created. Code written. Packages installed.
Wait. I don’t have to copy-paste?
“Type npm start.” I typed it. A to-do app appeared in my browser.
Five minutes. What took three hours with ChatGPT took five minutes.
Tried one more thing.
“Now a notes app.” Done.
“Connect a database.” Done.
“Login feature.” Done.
Everything I asked for worked. Nothing seemed impossible. Wait — maybe impossible things were happening. I just couldn’t tell. It ran, so I assumed it worked.
Three days in, I had five agents running. Can’t really explain what each one does. One collects data, one organizes, one analyzes, one reports, one monitors. Something like that.
They ran. If it runs, it works. Right? That’s what I told myself. I thought so.
Built a stock screener. Took two days.
Scans 586 US stocks across three strategies. Value, momentum, quality. Done in three minutes.
Before, I’d ask Claude “what is this?” Now I tell Claude “do this.”
Different feeling. Went from asking questions to giving orders.
“Run this automatically every day.” Done. Something called a cron job. Don’t know what that is but it runs every morning.
“Send results to Slack.” Done.
Am I a genius? I knew I wasn’t. But it felt that way. “I can build anything with this.”
That thought. That feeling. That was the trap.
But all of that was practice.
My real project? Something else. Three computers at home. Two desktops, one laptop. Work from my laptop outside. Still use the machines at home. Like one machine.
Nothing on the market did this. Built it myself.
The to-do app, the stock screener, the five agents — warm-ups. This was the real thing.
Then something was off.
One agent was pulling data slightly wrong. Fine yesterday, numbers are different today.
Tweaked the prompt. “Fetch in this format.” Fixed that. Something else broke.
Tweaked again. A feature I had before disappeared. Slack notifications stopped working.
Fix one thing, another breaks. Fix that, the first thing breaks again.
It wasn’t broken. But it wasn’t right either. Not fully dead, not fully alive. Stuck in between.
The scariest part? I couldn’t tell if it was correct.
Can’t read the code. Can’t tell where it went wrong. Afraid that asking for a fix would break it more.
So I left it alone. Figured touching it would only make it worse. “Good enough, I guess.” Closed my eyes.
AI-written code looks convincing.
That’s the real danger.
Completely broken code? Anyone spots that. Red error on screen — “yeah, that’s dead.”
But code that looks fine on the outside while rotting inside? It runs. No errors. But the data is slightly off. A feature quietly disappeared. It’s slower.
Someone who can read code opens it up and sees it. “Ah, memory leak here.” “This logic is tangled.”
I can’t read it. If the outside looks fine, I assume the inside is fine too.
That’s a disaster. That was my disaster.
“I thought it worked” is the scariest sentence. Can’t judge if it worked or not, but thinking it did anyway.
I thought I was a genius. Then I realized I knew nothing.
Survived like that. Believing if I don’t touch it, it won’t break.
But the worst part hadn’t come yet. The worst part came on a Monday morning.