When GenAI landed, I was initially hesitant.

Is it all talk?

Where can it help?

Is it good enough?

I quickly realised that creatively is was a step up, a power-up, a Mario 🍄. More for art than anything else at the time. DALL-E, I wasn’t so fussed about and so jumped in on Midjourney and quickly became proficient in utilising it.

Learning and exploring things with ChatGPT was intriguing for me, but the voice functionality was terrible in the early days for me as a North East of England speaker. Often thinking I was Welsh and replying in Welsh wasn’t helpful so I was mostly stuck to typed conversations.

Between then and today everything has rapidly accelerated. There’s actually far too much to cover in this one piece of writing, so expect follow-ups with where I use AI and what the advantages are for what I do both in and out of ‘work’.

The greatest unlock

One of the greatest gifts in the last 6 months has been a huge unlock for me personally. I’ve always been limited by software development skills. All the ideas, all the ability to design something, but lacking the ability to build the thing. Countless conversations with friends of “should we build this?”, but then life gets in the way.

So when Cursor arrived (amongst the whole host of other apps) I jumped in, deep.

I struggled at first, then found my feet, then I started to run.

If I thought Midjourney and ChatGPT were a 🍄, this was a 🍄 and a ⭐ together.

All-in

I tried a number of different ideas, some quickly failed whilst using previous versions of Cursor. Lots of hallucinations, lots of mistakes and to be honest it could have been more user error than anything else. But there was no giving up, I was hooked.

The first thing that went live was a collection of the Best AI Things that I’d come across or used. It tested me a little, getting it hooked up to Sanity for content management and just generally figuring things out. I need to come back to this and update it regularly with new content.

Then there was the Apple Watch app called ‘Plate Mate’, a little helper to pick your meals when you didn’t know what to choose. I made that more quickly than it took to submit it to the AppStore, and the outcome was that the AppStore submission process seemed so arduous I gave up and moved on to the next thing.

The next thing was Your Season Guide, an app that helps you wear the right coloured clothes that go with your features. This was far more in depth than anything I’d build previously and the first thing I’d submitted to Product Hunt.

And now I’m onto my next thing which is even greater still.

The freedom, the unlock, the confidence that doing all of this has given me has been incredible and there’s still so much more to do.

So yeah, vibe coding is pretty real.