I Didn't Learn Everything. That Was the Point.

I didn’t build this AI course because I was afraid of AI, or felt hopelessly behind.

AI tools bring back that 1980s tech wonder I felt watching Max Headroom on Letterman, or playing a Nintendo game for the first time. It’s that, “Oh, cool, the future is here right now,” kind of feeling.

Of course there’s a lot more at stake with AI than there ever was with Mario. Job displacement, electricity costs, the occasional extinction-event concern … heavier stuff than jumping on mushrooms.

I wanted to better understand what AI could do in my life and work, specifically.

And to show that you can do that, too. Even if you’re not a programmer. Even if you’re 50 years old.

You don’t have to know everything about AI for it to be useful in your work and life. You just have to know what’s possible, and be curious about how to bring it about.

That was the goal. And I built a few useful things along the way.

The Projects

The just-for-fun Michigan Weather site was a lesson in how Claude can help guide me in making things with other tools—in this case, Bolt and GitHub.

The AI Workout Trainer taught me about animations, and the requirement (and frustration) in using a middle man (n8n, here) to get applications talking to each other.

The Talkback Journal removes the friction from getting a quick journal entry down, which should lead to more writing with less hassle.

Patience and diligence go a long way in building your own tools. Some automations probably aren’t worth the time, so think through what you really want to create.

I learned debugging is a trying process, and one that will get easier (or go away) as automated coding tools improve.

Mostly, I learned to stop measuring myself against some imaginary AI power user. The most useful and fun tools to build are weirdly personal in appeal and utility.

There’s always the next frontier

I didn’t spend time on agentic tools like Clawdbot, the Wild West frontier of AI right now. If you read X, you might believe you’re already fossilized if you don’t have ten agents organizing your email and moving your files around.

In reality, it’s early in the agentic AI game, and there are huge security concerns with those programs right now. It’s not time for the non-programmers to jump into agents just yet—the juice is not yet worth the squeeze.

But it won’t be long.

Where do we go from here

AI is on a frenzied progression of growth and competition. Don't let that exhaust you. We don't need to know about and use all of it, no matter what the X tech bros are pushing.

My next project is under way. It’s more ambitious, aligned to my personal interests, and appropriately retro in nature. More on that soon.

We’re in this AI age together, whether we like it or not.