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

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

About 12 years ago—when I was ~16—I messed around with HTML/CSS/PHP, even made a little money online (DigitalPoint days). I picked up some fundamentals and learned my way around MySQL, but life went a different direction. When I tried to get back into coding later, everything felt so much more complex that I didn’t even know where to start.

Then I heard about “vibe coding.” I bought a Cursor subscription and started throwing ideas at it. It actually built some cool stuff, and I shifted into making small tools for my salvage yard job—trying to save time and cut down on paper.

At first my workflow was brutal: I’d generate code, upload via FTP, find bugs, paste errors back into AI…repeat. But I learned just enough to watch what the AI was doing and catch when it was hallucinating or stuck in an error loop.

The big breakthrough was learning Docker and running my site locally for testing, while keeping production online. That alone leveled me up.

Eventually I switched from Cursor to a Claude subscription and learned how to run Claude in the VS Code terminal using Git Bash. That was the real turning point for me. I mostly used Sonnet because it matched my pace—Opus felt like it could generate a whole novel of a spec doc and I’d get overwhelmed.

Over time I leveled up my workflow again: I learned SSH, and I had it help me build simple scripts to deploy to staging and then production. Now I can build locally, test on staging, and push to production without the constant manual chaos.

Since August, I’ve built 14 tools for my yard. Five are used in daily operations by 10+ users. I know the codebase isn’t perfect (there’s definitely spaghetti in there), but seeing real people use something I made—at work, every day—has been wild.

And now with Opus 4.5 + MCP dev tools, it’s like the speed jumped another full generation. I rebuilt a tool that I previously failed at twice—and this time it came together in under a five-hour session. That blew my mind.

My wife also gave me an idea for a “simple” Christmas list app…which naturally turned into a multi-tenant gift planner with stages, budgets, tracking, and all that. I tried a new approach: I spent an hour talking through the concept with the AI—workflow, security, sessions/cookies, design, edge cases—then had it produce a structured spec doc in sections with an index. From there, it delegated tasks to sub-agents and built the whole app from scratch.

The first pass didn’t fully work (lots of errors), but with MCP dev tools it systematically found issues, assigned fixes, and brought it into shape. After a couple more hours it was running, and I’ve been improving features and UI since.

This whole thing has made me genuinely addicted to building. It feels like I got access to a superpower I didn’t have before—and I can’t even imagine what someone with deep programming experience can do with this if they really master it.

I’m excited to see what comes next.

If you want, I can also give you:
* a short “social post” version (200–300 words),
* a LinkedIn-ish version (more structured, less “holy crap”),
* and a super raw version (keeps more slang + intensity, just trimmed).