Although I’ve been using ChatGPT since the early days, I hadn’t spent much time exploring the broader AI space—until recently. Our organization has started taking it seriously, forming several committees to examine it from all angles.
That shift pushed me to level up. I went from casual use to deep study, consuming as much as I could and spending many hours trying to make sense of it all. It was a major investment of time and attention. Once I began to absorb things, I felt I wanted to share my thoughts with those who are standing where I once was.
As a developer, I found myself more excited than others on the committee. Even though I don’t code full-time anymore, the possibilities I saw excited me. I’ve only dabbled in agentic tools like Gemini CLI so far, but I plan to go further. For the time being, I'm swamped in other work, but I plan to return to AI work as time opens up.
I don’t know where you are in your own AI journey. This course is for people who use ChatGPT regularly but haven’t gone much further—those who treat it as a better Google, but haven’t yet unlocked its potential. It’s general in scope, grounded in ChatGPT, but really about AI more broadly.
This is the kind of thinking I was lucky enough to do as part of our AI think group. I hope it’s useful to someone who’s just starting to see what’s possible.
Without a doubt. It's all about values and priorities. Each language was designed by a guiding philosophy, some set of values that shaped the way it was designed and the way in which it should properly be used. As a result, one language is going to promote some values over some values. This in turn will start to constrain (in a positive way) how you think about a problem. You'll think in terms of the language's paradigm (values) and this will cause you to see what's good about one paradigm over another.
There's no silver bullet, just different priorities.
Trying new languages will help give you a well-rounded perspective and will have you porting ideas from other languages into your current language often with benefit.
I think of passion as some degree of obsession. You pour over content about your craft in an effort to learn the subtleties not because you're striving to better your position but for the love of the work. You could say you have an affection toward your subject matter.
A good sign of someone who is passionate is that they often speak with great conviction when sharing some debatable viewpoint.
Whether minimalist or not, what I want is beauty. Although beauty exists in both minimalist and non-minimalist designs, the minimalist one are refreshingly lighter and make reading (the main point of content) a nicer experience. This blog is as minimal as they come, but (to me) makes for a nice reading experience:
Consider also that some people just wanna get their shingle out on the web. Better to whip up a minimal blog and begin posting than to delay because you've gotta have a more intricate, pixel-perfect design that exemplifies your creativity.
You'd be surprised how may projects exist that are like this. But somehow template languages are always more popular and have more traction. I guess there are very few people who would rather have code produce markup than have markup allow code. Perhaps because large projects have their markup written by non-coders?
I prefer building in Markaby style. When I used to maintain a Radiant CMS site I'd sometimes need to generate content that I couldn't generate with the native tags. I'd end up having to teach Radius how to do something new. This interfered with "getting things done." Code doesn't get in your way.
Don't get me wrong. Markup/templating languages are great for 80% of what you use them for. And I especially like that they sandbox the average user from doing anything dangerous. I just felt like in the 20% scenarios, tweaking the markup language was a painful hoop through which to jump.
It's not always a bad thing to go down a path and then to decide it's the wrong path. It's a far cry worse to continue down the wrong path because you're determined to finish what you've started.
If follow through is your issue, maybe you're biting off too much to start or maybe you haven't found a idea worth the follow through. What you've first gotta do is to count the cost of implementation. It might take you a month or so of actual work on your idea to fully grasp the real size of your project, but once you have the picture, you have to ask is this worth seeing it through to completion? Anything is worth it if it's worth it to you, if it's some contribution you want to make that you feel and believe is worth making. Once you find that, then just commit and promise yourself that you'll make one small step at a time until you're done. Form a habit. If you can form a habit you'll more likely succeed than you will if you only work on your "project" here and there as you feel the desire to do so.
Second guideline: Manage your constraints. Get to version 1 of your deliverable as soon as possible by limiting just how big v1 actually is. (See Eric Ries on Vimeo.)
It's important to learn your whole life long but as far as making vs. learning goes this is an easy one: you should be far more heavily slanted toward "making".
I used to read voraciously about everything because I wanted to do things the "right way." You don't learn much at all by just reading. It's when you learn the thing while you're doing it that it matters even if you're making lots of mistakes.
Be more disposed toward doing. It's the better route to success.
That shift pushed me to level up. I went from casual use to deep study, consuming as much as I could and spending many hours trying to make sense of it all. It was a major investment of time and attention. Once I began to absorb things, I felt I wanted to share my thoughts with those who are standing where I once was.
As a developer, I found myself more excited than others on the committee. Even though I don’t code full-time anymore, the possibilities I saw excited me. I’ve only dabbled in agentic tools like Gemini CLI so far, but I plan to go further. For the time being, I'm swamped in other work, but I plan to return to AI work as time opens up.
I don’t know where you are in your own AI journey. This course is for people who use ChatGPT regularly but haven’t gone much further—those who treat it as a better Google, but haven’t yet unlocked its potential. It’s general in scope, grounded in ChatGPT, but really about AI more broadly.
This is the kind of thinking I was lucky enough to do as part of our AI think group. I hope it’s useful to someone who’s just starting to see what’s possible.
This is shared with my employer's consent.