oscar-gabriel-dev

The first time I tried to learn to code, I was 12 years old staring at a book on HTML in the middle of a Barnes & Noble. After 20 minutes of staring and flipping and getting frustrated, I decided it wasn't for me and went off to find a graphic novel instead.

In the years that followed, I maintained a passive interest in web design (becoming a regular visitor of sites like awwwards.com and httpster.net), and every couple years I would try again to dip my toe into web development, but each time I would give up again feeling like I just couldn't do it.

I even got into trying out no-code tools that promised to give me what I was after without all the technical fuss. Sites like Squarespace and Webflow and Framer were fun and pretty, but the lack of control quickly got to me and only made me want to learn to do it "for real" even more, so I could decide for myself every exacting detail and behavior that felt best to me.

But still I felt like I wasn't good enough. Until a light finally shone down on me in the form of the large language model. You may have heard of it.

The Bait-and-Switch (In a Good Way)

Almost exactly a year ago was the first time that I tried out Claude 3.5, and shortly after Bolt.new and Lovable turned Claude into a beacon that allowed me to finally turn an idle curiosity and vague dream into a promising reality. Finally I could explain in great detail exactly what I wanted to see on the page and have it become a real website before my eyes, still WITHOUT having to learn to code. Or so I was initially led to believe.

The deeper I got into the intimate details of what the LLMs and agents and chat builders were actually doing (and more importantly, what they were bad at doing), the more I accidentally learned about web development, so that I could fill in the holes for the chat bot.

And then before I knew it, I had filled in so many holes, that I had scaffolded out an entire basic project "on my own" that I could then unleash the agent on to build specific features for me within the sandbox I had built for it.

What AI Actually Teaches You

I think that both the twitter grifters and grumpy skeptics miss the point. The grifters sell you on the idea that AI can write perfect code for you if you just read their seventeen-tweet thread, sign up for their master class, and string together the perfect orchestra of disparate tools. And the skeptics think it's dangerous to even touch an LLM lest it make you a dumb, lazy, psychosis-fueled zombie. As is generally the case, both extremes are wrong.

AI can't do all the code for you. But it can teach you to think like a coder.

When Claude generates a component that almost works but the styling breaks, you start asking the right questions: Why is this div behaving this way? What does flex-1 actually mean? When state management fails in ways the AI can't diagnose, you find yourself in the React docs; you're not trying to become an all-around React expert, you just need to find the right snippet to explain to the AI what's happening so it can fix it properly. And if you read more than you need to and learn other stuff along the way? Even better.

You become a translator between what you want and what the machine understands. In that translation process—learning to speak the AI's language well enough to get good results—you accidentally start speaking the computer's language too.

The Scaffolding Effect

The most valuable thing AI did wasn't writing code. It was eliminating the blank page problem.

Instead of staring at an empty VS Code window wondering where to begin, I had a working (if imperfect) foundation to iterate on. When you're debugging broken authentication, you're not trying to learn "Javascript Fundamentals", you're solving one specific, tangible problem. A problem whose answer is somewhere in the library documentation you've already pulled up. Now you just have to read the docs and find the answer and either apply it yourself or tell the AI to do it. But either way it was your idea. And that's far less intimidating.

The AI gives you just enough direction to lead you to the water. It's up to you to take a drink. And before you know it, you're confidently editing files, understanding folder structures, and yes, coding.

Something for Everyone

If you love AI-assisted development: Stop expecting it to make you a $1MM ARR product overnight. Start expecting it to create a thousand small opportunities to become someone who has the ability to make that product. The magic isn't in the code it writes but in the problems it creates that only you can solve.

If you hate AI-assisted development: You're right that it won't make someone an expert by itself. But you're wrong if you think it can't be an effective backdoor into actual learning. Sometimes the best way to learn something is to trick yourself into thinking you're doing something else entirely.

My Confession

At this stage of my career, I still wouldn't feel comfortable calling myself a "real" developer. I can't tell you off the top of my head how to invert a binary tree. I can't diagram exactly what happens between the server and the client in a React app. I would still learn a lot from that Barnes & Noble book on HTML.

But I can comfortably navigate a codebase. I can reason about what is needed to implement a new feature, and come up with a list of all the components and business logic needed to do so. I have opinions on what the best options for each piece of a tech stack are (which I WILL be telling you about in the future). I've even submitted and had a PR merged into an open source project!

So, y'know, I think you can get pretty close to the title of "real" developer by letting a chat bot convince you that it's doing it for you, when in actuality, it's creating just enough friction between what should work and what actually works that you have no choice but to solve the problems yourself.

In trying to teach the AI to code better, you accidentally become better at coding too.

I don't think any of this would be nearly effective of marketing as what the big companies are already using.

But maybe it's exactly how it's supposed to work.

Want to see what I built while "not learning to code"? Check out my completely AI-assisted project portfolio here. In my next blog post, I'll talk about how web development is like shopping, and how to "shop for AI".