Editing Openai/692ad5f8-1fbc-8002-bc75-245a4b2194e9 (section)

=== Assistant: Got you. ===
Got you. Here’s a version that keeps your run-on vibe (without turning into chaos), uses more commas and “and/but”, and just feels more like someone talking than “perfect writing”.

===== Polished but still your style (fewer periods, more flow) =====

I started using AI to code in August 2025 and it’s honestly one of the most empowering and insane things I’ve experienced.

When I was about 16 (like 12 years ago) I messed around with HTML, CSS, and a little PHP, and I even made some money online as a kid on sites like DigitalPoint, I got a lot of the fundamentals down and learned how to manage a MySQL database, but my life went a different direction and I never really got back into coding.

Then in the last few years when I started getting interested again, it felt like everything had gotten so much more complex than I remembered, like not even “hard”, more like “where do I even start”, and then I heard about vibe coding and I grabbed a Cursor subscription and started throwing ideas at it just to see what would happen.

It actually made some neat stuff, and I ended up building tools for my salvage yard job to make my life and my coworkers’ lives easier and to use less paper, the early tools were simple but I wasted a lot of time with a rough workflow where the AI would build something, I’d upload it by FTP to test, I’d find errors, paste the errors back to the AI, and repeat, but I understood just enough to sit there and watch what it was doing, and because I read fast I could usually catch when it was hallucinating or getting stuck in an error loop.

Eventually I realized there had to be a better way, then I learned about Docker and got my site running locally for testing while keeping staging and production online, and that alone was a huge upgrade.

After that I realized Cursor wasn’t really the best fit for me, so I switched to Claude and learned how to run it in the VS Code terminal with Git Bash, and that was a big turning point, I used Sonnet almost all the time because it matched my pace, Opus was powerful but it could generate specs so long that I’d get overwhelmed.

Over time I learned SSH too, and I had it help me create simple deploy scripts, one for staging and one for production, so now Claude can help me build locally, I can test on staging, then deploy to production without digging through directories and doing everything manually, and that workflow has been awesome.

Since August I’ve built 14 tools for my yard, and five of them are used in daily operations by 10+ users, I know the codebase isn’t perfect and there’s definitely spaghetti in places, but seeing real people use stuff I built at work is still kind of unreal.

Now with Opus 4.5 and MCP dev tools it feels like what used to take me weeks can happen in days, I rebuilt a tool that I had already attempted twice before and got nowhere but this time it came together in under a 5 hour session, and I was honestly blown away.

My wife gave me an idea that was supposed to be a simple Christmas list web app, just a clean way for us to list people, add gift ideas, compare prices at different places, and decide later, but it turned into a multi-tenant gift planner that tracks stages, budgets, and all the other stuff that happens in real life when you’re actually trying to buy gifts and not forget what you already found.

I also learned a new approach that made a big difference, instead of just telling the AI “build the app”, I spent time going back and forth on the whole concept, workflow, login/security, sessions/cookies, design details, edge cases, then I had it write a spec doc in sections with an index so it could delegate pieces to sub-agents and build the app in a cleaner way instead of one massive spaghetti blob.

The first pass built everything but it didn’t work right away and there were errors all over the place, but with MCP dev tools it could actually verify things, find patterns, assign fixes, and bring it into shape without me guessing, after a couple more hours it was working and I’ve been improving the UI and adding features since.

This AI stuff is honestly the craziest tech shift I’ve experienced in my life, I’m kind of addicted to building now, and I can’t even imagine what someone who truly understands software can do with this if they use it at full power, I’m really excited to see what’s next.

If you want it even more “you”, here are two quick tweaks you can apply:
* Replace a couple “honestly” with “no joke” or “I’m not even kidding”
* Add one or two punchy single-line breaks like: “That part still blows my mind.” or “And yeah, it’s addicting.”