I know nothing about programming and have been using AI to build a prototype, a MVP, based on some hand drawn wireframes for a business idea I have been thinking about since 2022, where I suddenly thought up my “solution”.

It’s been an interesting experience because I’ve tried to learn coding before got bored way more quickly. This time, the AI suggested I use Swift. I genuinely didn’t know if that was a good or bad suggestion so I went with it.

And it’s taking me AGES is not an efficient way to develop anything! Not even a prototype, but at this stage I don’t have the money to pay anyone to do it for me, so I’ll persevere because I actually genuinely believe in my idea, but I actually am finding it fun and rewarding. Every time I run my code and find it works I get a buzz out of that. And every time AI generates something shit that doesn’t work, I’m forced to actually look at the code and figure out what the problem is, and how to fix it.

Slowly but surely, it’s like… even though I’m doing something in a language I don’t understand, I’m starting to learn what bits of it mean because they either lead to an outcome, or they recur in a similar pattern that my brain goes “oh ok, that’s what that bit of code does”.

It’s probably a terrible way to learn, but I’m still learning. I’m still building an MVP. Even if the whole business idea is a massive failure, I’ve learned a little bit about Swift, I’ve also learned the value of human programmers and I can tell you one thing - if my business is a success and I can get it off the ground, I’ll be investing big time in human programmers and I won’t mind at all if they use AI to assist them if it makes them more efficient on whatever.

I don’t really care if it’s vibe-coding, or AI assisted programming, it’s another way of acquiring a skill, and as far as I can tell, at a minimum it lowers the barrier to entry to coding in an unconventional way.