Editing Openai/692ad5f8-1fbc-8002-bc75-245a4b2194e9 (section)

=== Assistant: Got it — you want it to flow with way fewer hard stops, more like you’re talking, with only a handful of periods total … ===
Got it — you want it to flow with way fewer hard stops, more like you’re talking, with only a handful of periods total and using line breaks + commas to control the rhythm

Here’s a rewrite like that (no em dashes, very few periods)

I started using AI to code in August 2025 and it’s honestly one of the most empowering and insane things I’ve ever experienced

When I was about 16 (like 12 years ago) I messed around with HTML, CSS, and a little PHP, and I even made some money online as a kid on sites like DigitalPoint, I got a lot of fundamentals down and learned how to manage MySQL, but my life went a different direction and I never really got back into coding

When I got interested again in the last few years it felt like everything had gotten way more complex than I remembered, not even just hard, more like “where do I even start,” then I heard about vibe coding so I grabbed Cursor and started throwing ideas at it just to see what would happen

It actually made some neat stuff and I started building tools for my salvage yard job to make my life and my coworkers’ lives easier and cut down on paper, but my early process was rough, I’d have the AI build something, upload via FTP, test it, find errors, paste the errors back, repeat, and I understood just enough to watch what it was doing and catch when it was hallucinating or stuck in an error loop

Then I learned Docker and got my site running locally for testing while keeping staging and production online, and that alone was a huge upgrade because the whole build-test-fix loop got way faster and less frustrating

Eventually I realized Cursor wasn’t the best fit for me and I switched to Claude, then I learned how to run it in the VS Code terminal with Git Bash and that was a turning point, I mostly used Sonnet because it matched my pace, Opus was powerful but it could generate specs so long I’d get overwhelmed

Over time I learned SSH too and had it help me create simple deploy scripts, one for staging and one for production, so now I can build locally with Claude, test on staging, then deploy to production without doing everything manually, and that workflow has been awesome

Since August I’ve built 14 tools for my yard and five are used in daily operations by 10+ users, I know the codebase isn’t perfect and there’s definitely spaghetti code in places, but seeing people use stuff I made at work every day is still kind of unreal

Now with Opus 4.5 and MCP dev tools it feels like what used to take weeks can happen in days, I rebuilt a tool that I had already attempted twice before and wasted days getting nowhere, but this time it came together in under a 5 hour session and that honestly blew my mind

My wife gave me an idea that was supposed to be a simple Christmas list web app, just list people, add items, compare prices at different places, decide later, but it turned into a multi-tenant gift planner that tracks stages, budgets, and the whole reality of trying to keep gift hunting organized without forgetting what you already found

I also learned a new approach that made a huge difference, instead of just saying “build the app,” I spent an hour going back and forth on the full concept, workflow, security, sessions/cookies, UI details, edge cases, then I had it write a spec doc in sections with an index so it could delegate chunks to sub-agents and build it cleanly instead of one giant spaghetti blob

It built the whole structure in one shot but it didn’t work right away and there were errors everywhere, but with MCP dev tools it could actually verify things, spot patterns, assign fixes, and bring it into shape without me guessing, and after a couple more hours it was working and I’ve been adding features and improving the UI since

This AI stuff is the craziest tech shift I’ve seen in my life, I’m honestly addicted to vibe coding now, and I can’t even imagine what people who really understand programming can do with this if they use it at full power, I’m excited to see what’s next

If you want an even more “you” feel, here are two tiny tweaks that help a lot:
* drop in 2–3 casual “beats” as their own lines like “No joke.” / “That part still doesn’t feel real.” / “It’s addicting.”
* keep only 3–5 total periods in the entire thing, and use line breaks when you want the reader to breathe

If you want, I can also do a shorter version in this same run-on style (like 40% shorter) so it hits harder without losing your story.