How I Slowly Figured Out How to Code With AI — A Journey Over 2 Years
From staring open-mouthed at ChatGPT to paying USD 200 a month to Anthropic — a very honest, slightly embarrassing account of how I actually learned to work with AI coding tools.
The day I met ChatGPT
I think the model had a few million parameters back then, and ChatGPT was answering everything. My NLP brain was unable to process what I was seeing. I was staring at the responses with my mouth wide open, eyes excited to see what else it could do.
Then I gave it a small document and tried to discuss the nuances. ChatGPT excelled at the task and got 1000/100 from me. I thought — this is the moment.
I also tried some basic programming tasks but was like — okay, this is trivial.
Then came Midjourney
Midjourney was my first dollar spent on AI. I tried many variants of crazy ideas — at least I thought those were crazy.
One was a pigeon fight, where a pigeon was a warrior leading the charge. Another was a cowboy riding a crocodile. And then a bunny who is the ultimate destroyer and villain.
All went well on the first cut. I was even more excited about the future.
Dall-E was the first AI that disappointed me in the series.
The handmade sketch moment
Then came the day I tried giving a handmade sketch of a webpage to ChatGPT. It did a great job and handed me back full working CSS and HTML.
Then I asked how to turn it into a React application — and in those two hours I felt more comfortable with React than I had in over 100 hours of online courses before that. Building something I actually wanted to make, something I was going to showcase to my manager, taught me more than all of that.
My encounter with Anthropic was stupid
I heard that Anthropic had launched an LLM similar to ChatGPT, and I commented — who will use Anthropic when ChatGPT is already there?
I was completely unaware of my soon-to-be companion, Claude Code.
The day I paid USD 20 to Claude, and then paid the remaining balance to reach USD 200 on the very same day, I realised one thing — one should never judge anything too quickly. :D
Sorry Cursor, but you made crazy money from X so I don’t feel bad anymore
I found that Cursor does not check the MAC address or anything machine-specific, and allows a new quota to developers with a new email.
Cursor was the first time I truly realised that the future was going to be exciting and challenging at the same time. I was so confident after Cursor that I started feeling I could build anything over a weekend with a few email IDs.
Then came Claude Code
It has been 16 months now and I am paying USD 200 to Anthropic. Trust me, this is the best investment I have ever made in myself.
I started with Claude Code in Claude Desktop, copy-pasting code into my workspace for four to five days. I thought I had made a mistake buying the USD 200 subscription.
I started looking through forums, on Twitter, and discussed my frustrations with ChatGPT. Then one night, I found the magical tool named Desktop Commander. It gives Claude Desktop access to your repository — Claude can directly read and write your files.
The database incident
On a fine day, at 6 PM, just as I was about to give a demo — and another team was also supposed to be using the same database my application was pushing to — Claude deleted the database instance. We were in the middle of discussing a bug and I wanted to redesign a table.
That day I was forced to learn everything about configurations in Claude Desktop. And that same day I read everything about the claude.md file.
From that day, I spend at least two hours every week just finding new ways to make my framework stronger — and making absolutely sure Claude never plays another game that would force me to type “sorry” a hundred times.
The magic of MCP integration
I was discussing with a friend who was working on some 3D simulation for an architect. I knew Blender is a tool that can build 3D designs using Python scripts, and I thought of giving the prototype pictures to ChatGPT and asking for the Python script I could run in Blender.
I tried and waited for the magic to happen, but I realised that mastering a tool takes time — and if the tool is for modelling, it takes years.
I did not lose hope and kept looking for some clue about how I could use AI for 3D design.
I stumbled upon a post where a founder was promoting a marketplace to generate 3D .obj files. I read everything about that product, watched all the YouTube videos and demo videos, and learned that there is an MCP tool that Claude Code can use — and you just need to run an MCP server plugin (absolutely free) inside Blender.
I designed a 3D room with a sofa, bed, tables, and a chair, and also moved them after loading them on the web. The Z-axis was troubling me a lot — but I got the confidence that I had cracked the jackpot.
What else can be done with MCP is a topic for another day.
Terminal, readme, and the /resume rabbit hole
On a magical day, I decided to set up Claude Code on the terminal and learn the nuances I had been hearing about on Twitter and in YouTube videos. It took two to three days to figure out what workflow actually worked for me optimally. The very first files were readme.md and claude.md, and I started generating whole projects from those.
Then one day I accidentally discovered the /resume tool in Claude Code. It was like another piece of magic — I no longer had to worry about how Claude would get context or how I would summarise all the work from past sessions.
Claude works best when you don’t use /resume
This advice made my life tough. I was perfectly happy with my workflow — starting with readme and claude files, then going through /resume. Then I watched Andrej Karpathy, who is the ultimate authority on these things.
I left all coding tasks for two days. I promised myself not to use Claude Code again until I figured out an optimal workflow where I was not forced to use /resume.
I still use /resume a lot — but now I know where it helps instead of slowing the agent down. I know where it helps the agent work more accurately instead of hallucinating.
Everything is back to basics
As my professor used to say — you will revisit the core books again and again in your career, and every single time you will learn something new.
I am reading system design a lot. I am reading software engineering principles. I am reading about databases again.
The simple goal is to use Claude Code better. And that is definitely possible if I can:
- Make my database design more efficient.
- Make my system design modular and follow the single responsibility principle.
- Validate the work that Claude has done for me.
That is where I am today. Still figuring it out — just faster than before.