Down the rabbit hole.
Learning to code AI as a 51-year old. And programming's finally cool.
I’m finally coding for real at this very advanced and decrepit age. I know I’m old because I still call it “programming” more than I call it “coding”. But I like the idea of saving a syllable. And “code” makes it sound like you might also be a secret agent.
I’m coding. But I’m not really a programmer. Or am I?
I did go to computer camp as a kid. I was that nerdy.
In third grade, I got glasses and they came with free bullies! It was 1981 and Asia was the coolest rock band in history.
I designed my own font at age 11 with the first Macintosh computer (1984). I don’t remember anything about it, but I’m sure it was the best font ever.
In 6th grade, I learned some basic computer stuff on the TRS-80 model III’s my elementary school had. The coolest kid was saving girls’ measurements to disk. Hey, it was the 80s. But I know he made them all up. And he wasn’t really that cool.
I designed a computer game called Tired ‘N’ Dragon, but didn’t program it.
Inspired by Archon, I designed a game that was like a new form of chess with all the pieces and their moves, but didn’t program it.
At 16, I decided to stop being nerdy and find some girls to kiss. That was my major “see ya” to the programming world. And I did find the girls.
At 23, a guy offered me a job where I should have learned PERL, but I didn’t. It seemed like too much work.
At 27, I was part of a startup trying to make Chinese herbal formulas more accessible through the web. I programmed a javascript frontend that did some calculations in forms. I was trying to impress a girl. The startup failed. But I married the girl.
At 32, I was a Google Ads consultant, and the web was exploding, and I thought about learning PHP, but I didn’t. People like Neil Patel started businesses and were successful. I stayed in the service business.
At 37, I was a Facebook ads expert and author, and a lot of the top social media people were creating tools- a friend of mine created PageLever to do some Facebook things that Facebook didn’t do. He sold the business for cash. I stayed in the service business.
At 51, AI was exploding, and I added it to my keynote speaking topics. But the difference was, I said to myself, “This is one of those moments, like shifts before: the Internet, SEO, digital ads, social media, where companies will create tools- shovels and picks- and make tons of money. Some people will become AI consultants, and that’s fine, but this time I need to build something.”
Another big thing changed. I had finally been diagnosed with ADHD, and got on the right medication, and now my brain was organized enough to program!
So, in June I began to learn python, machine learning, and deep learning.
Thank God for LLMs, because they make it so much faster and easier to brainstorm projects, outline them, and start coding. If you’re a DIY’er and an autodidact, this is the way to go.
Here’s my progress in the last three months:
Started learning to program python with Jupyter notebooks.
Learned a lot of python basics, like pip, env, conda, libraries, etc.
Switched to VSCode as my IDE.
Trained a basic machine learning model on how to identify laughter in standup comedy WAV files. It still needs work. ML is a complicated area, audio ML is another layer of complexity, and if you’re going to label hundreds of files as laughter or non-laughter, it takes time.
Added GitHub copilot for AI-assisted coding.
Built a simple little LLM game where you roleplay as a person trying to become a famous celebrity. It was ok, but really as long as you do the most shocking thing you can think of that’s not too illegal, you’ll get famous. That may also be true in real life.
Built a working business idea brainstormer that runs at the command line and leverages multiple LLM agents and Perplexity (RAG) to help you create, analyze, explore, and validate business ideas.
Created about 15 projects overall, some of which didn’t work because I was too new to programming, and, more recently, some that do work!
The experience has been kinda like…
Read a lot of stuff I don’t understand.
Listen to a lot of videos I don’t understand.
Listen to podcast conversations about stuff I don’t understand.
Read Reddit discussions about stuff I don’t understand.
Ask Perplexity, Google, ChatGPT, and Claude a ton of questions about all of the stuff I don’t understand.
Start to understand bits of it.
Try to program some idea I have.
Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Github CoPilot, Cursor, Codestral for code ideas, bug fixes, and so on.
Occasionally get something to work.
Plan MVP versions of projects with ChatGPT or Claude.
Get the MVP to work and start adding features and improvements.
I’ll write more about the comedy AI stuff in another post. My next steps in coding are:
Learn streamlit so I can show my coding projects to the world with a GUI.
Start seeing if anyone finds my projects useful.
See if anyone will pay for any of them.
Create things that help us with our advertising client work, and my keynote speaking work (especially organization and travel planning).
And there we go! An old guy, doing cool stuff, learning new things.
I think if you stay excited, work on difficult things, and keep learning, you’ll stay young at heart, or in mind, even if your skin is getting weird and people just think you’re some old guy.
Have fun with it!