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I am a little late to the AI coding party, I know. Does it matter? No.
The reason is I haven’t really had the time in the last few months. Or the motivation. I wanted things to settle down a bit before I dipped in. Probably an introvert’s instinct.
Recently though, I’ve had a go. I just built a few tiny humble little projects to experiment with.
First was a flag quiz in JavaScript, built in a few hours.
I didn’t use your typical ‘vibe coding’ app either. I’ve gone the ‘assisted coding’ route so far.
I used ChatGPT most of the time, with a quick detour to Claude. Both were brilliant… and both happily produced broken code, rewrote things that were fine, and occasionally invented things I didn’t ask for.
Some of this was on me. I asked it to handle a multi-file setup all at once whilst using the free plan. But you learn its limits and have fun. Hey ho.
Second was a simple directory. This uses a Google Sheet and displays it on a web page as a filterable directory. It’s something I need actually. This one took about 1 hour to get a demo working.
Every wrong turn taught me something I’d never have looked up otherwise. I even tackled my first Git deployments. Using VSCode and Cloudflare Pages, I pushed my code, and my flag quiz and directory demo were live.
Third, I’ve just made my own personal word and character counter, (with a Read Time estimater built in).
They’re not perfect, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a start.
The whole experience felt like a snapshot of coding in the AI era:
- The tools are powerful, but not perfect.
- You still need to understand the code (a bit).
- Patience is a bigger asset than speed.
Sure, I could’ve built it all by hand but I wouldn’t have learned half as much.
For now, onwards and hopefully building more things.
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