By Wendy Liu
Publication Date: 2026-05-24 07:00:00
Long before the age of multi-billion dollar AI companies promising to revolutionize the field of software development, I learned to code the hard way.
It was the mid-2000s and I was a kid with uncontrolled access to the family computer. Using a simple text editor program, I learned how to create websites—simple at first, then more complex—from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or sophisticated as I imagined, but I could live with it because I was learning a craft. The tedious hours of debugging and poring over obscure documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.
This all sounds so strange now, in a time when anyone can build a fancy-looking app with OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code, and high school dropouts are raising millions for their AI startups.
To be clear: my educational path was not particularly efficient; I toiled alone, following my own shoddy, made-up curriculum, motivated by curiosity…
