Learning with AI (Part 0) - Getting past the cold start problem

"Anyone can become an expert in anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners."

— James Dyson (Against the Odds: An Autobiography)

Before SpaceX, Elon Musk's companies hadn't built physical products. James Dyson didn't train as an engineer; he went to art school and graduated with a degree in industrial design. Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) doesn't have a Computer Science degree. Estée Lauder got her start selling homemade skincare creams in New York beauty salons.

Everyone starts somewhere and that somewhere is often not as far along as you think it is, especially if you focus on where they ended up. Household names like Musk, Dyson and Lauder all started at zero. People start at zero again and again and still succeed.

I started at zero with Claude, rather than Cursor or other great options, because a few people in my life, and a couple of writers I follow, said they were starting projects with Claude that sounded cool. Realizing that you don't need to be a developer to make things with Claude was enough to get me past my own cold start.

The more I built, the more I noticed a gap between high-level pronouncements of a company being "AI-first" and Anthropic technical staff running loops from their phone while they sleep. I'm writing this series to sit somewhere between those extremes; it's the thing that would have helped the version of me starting out. Writing also sharpens my thinking, so I expect it to make my products better too.

I've made plenty of painful mistakes, like crashing my first website while trying to sync data across devices. Those lessons will shape what I write here, but there is no grand plan. It will be the topics that inspired me enough to write about them.

At five months in, I feel close enough to launching my own products to write this with skin in the game.

My hope is that people who read this series will realize two things:

  1. It's still so early for using AI and you haven't "missed it."
  2. You can learn using AI to make things for yourself, even starting from zero.

You can just start.

You will learn by doing.

You will learn your own way, not how I or anyone else learnt.

Jeremy

P.S. If you need more inspiration to get started, read what others say here.

This post is provided for general information, commentary and discussion purposes only. It is not legal, investing or other professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any errors or omissions are unintentional. The views expressed are those of the author in a personal capacity and do not represent the views of any employer, client, partner or affiliated organization. Generative AI tools were used to assist with research and editing.