Why I started building again

I've worked with data for most of my career.

And for most of that career, there was always a missing piece — we could collect it, store it, model it. But turning it into something useful, quickly, for real people? That always felt one step away.

GenAI changed that equation.

Here's my timeline:

→ 2022 — ChatGPT hits. Everyone's talking about it.
→ 2024 — Agentic AI becomes the new buzzword.
→ 2025 — I hear the term "vibe coding" for the first time.

The reaction in most rooms: smirks. Skepticism. That's not real engineering.

My reaction: this is my way back in.

I haven't written production code in years. My role doesn't allow it. But I used to from C++ on a Pentium 4 to ETL pipelines until 7 years back. That feeling never left.

Andrej Karpathy's framing of vibe coding gave me permission to play again.

I started with Base44 around summer 2025. No grand plan. Just curiosity and my oldest habit: obsessing over productivity. I wanted to build a simple habit tracker — something to keep my top 3 goals visible every day.

What came out was Momentum.

Rough at first. Then better. I used it through the entire build process. I still use it now.
👉 https://lnkd.in/ev8aHEHM

Back in summer 2025 I didn't even know Claude existed. (Yes, living under a rock.)

But that small build unlocked something bigger. What I understood — slowly, then all at once — is that software is entering a genuinely new era. Not hype. A structural shift in who gets to build, and how fast.

That energy from writing my first loop in C++? It's back. Louder than before.

This is the first post in a series on what I've been building, learning, and where I think this is all heading.

If you're a product person, a data person, or someone who used to build things and stopped —

This one's for you.