My AI creator journey

Before I ever touched AI, I was an online marketplace seller. I sold health supplements.

I loved anything to do with technology since I was a kid, AI most of all.
But code felt impossibly hard, and very far away from me.
I had so many games and apps I wanted to make,
and every one of them looked too hard, or too expensive to build.

Then three years ago, I ran into ChatGPT.

At the start I was just poking around,
chatting with it, asking simple questions, getting it to write copy for me.

Honestly, the copy it wrote back then was terrible, and I had no idea what a prompt was.
But I still thought it was incredible,
like a kid who just found a new toy.

And there was a moment when I really felt it. AI could change the way I make a living.

I took classes back then, and everything the teachers taught was ChatGPT.
But I picked up one lesson worth more than all of it:

Understand what generative AI is, understand how it works underneath, and every tool starts to make sense at once.

My understanding of AI
levelled up step by step, along with AI itself.
During that stretch I spent at least 8 hours a day talking to AI and exploring, almost every day.

The real wake-up moment came about a year ago.

ChatGPT shipped a canvas feature,
and I watched a teacher give it instructions, have it write code, and preview the web page it produced.
I looked at the page running on the screen and thought:

"Could I build something other people would actually use?"

That was where all of it started.

Going from ChatGPT to Claude
took me a long time.
I only really started using Claude last July.

Before that,
back when I did not even know dev tools like VS Code existed, I was screenshotting things into the GPT web app and pasting code back one piece at a time.

Same with Claude. Before I knew what Claude Code was, I was pasting screenshots into the web app, waiting for my tokens to reset, building very slowly.

I vibe coded a lot of things that failed.
But my sense of how code is structured, what I know about building websites, my full-stack view of things,
all of it came out of those failures, one after another.
Not one of them was wasted.

And I never once wanted to quit.
Something in the back of my head kept telling me
AI was the thing I had to hold onto in this life.

The only thing that really blocked me was running out of tokens, over and over.

About the first game product that ever made me money.
I only set out to build a quest board,
and somewhere along the way it turned into a game, Crispy Kingdom.

Carrying all of that into this year,
a friend and I laid out the architecture for NaLi Match in a single day,
and in two weeks we had the whole nail and lash matching platform in good shape, with nearly 200 artists on it. A complete vibe coding product that genuinely makes money.

If you ask me
for one line to give someone who is where I was, no coding at all but wanting to build with AI:

This series takes the whole path, from zero to where I am now, and breaks it down piece by piece.

If you want to build your own thing with AI, come along and read it with me.

I promise you will walk away with something.