How to Build Your Own Software with AI (No Experience Necessary)
By popular demand...
I’ve had a crazy past 24 hours.
If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I’ve always enjoyed hacking together software to help me with my work or life.
But I’d usually hit a point where I wasn’t skilled enough to build what I wanted to build, and the projects would never be as helpful as I hoped.
That all changed last year. With ChatGPT and Claude getting increasingly competent at helping me work through my programming challenges, I’ve been blown away by how much I can build despite being a hobbyist developer.
I’ve been spending some time in the last month using the latest tools to hack together apps to automate or improve parts of my work, and I’m honestly shocked at how easily I can build things now.
In the last couple weeks, I built:
A tool to take podcast episodes and create nice transcripts, show notes, title ideas, and more
A tool to provide detailed professional-level editing feedback on aspects of my book
An entirely new website for myself, plus one for my new podcast
A personal task manager / goal setter
The more I build with these tools, the more I’m realizing we’re entering a golden age of easy, personalized, software development.
Which brings us to 24 hours ago. A friend replied to one of my tweets saying he was really impressed with the software I was hacking together using these AI tools, and wanted to learn how to do it, and asked if I could run a small cohort to teach people.
I asked on X if anyone else was interested, and over 100 people replied saying yes.
I was honestly hesitant to make another course. I’ve been out of that game for four years and didn’t think I was ever going to make one again. But when I saw how much interest there is in this topic I realized it would be both extremely valuable to people and a lot of fun for me.
So I decided what the hell, let’s do it. And now 24 hours later nearly 150 students are enrolled 🤯.
"Build Your Own Life Coach" will teach you how to use AI to create custom software by walking you step-by-step through building your own fully functional AI Life Coach.
Starting from zero programming knowledge, you'll build a personal productivity tool where you can:
Manage your tasks
Set and track your progress towards bigger goals
Reflect on your success and challenges
Get tailored feedback and advice from your AI coach
Add any additional features you might want for your perfect personal productivity tool
By the end, you’ll have a framework you can follow to build any other kind of software you might want by using AI tools to do most of the programming for you.
You'll also gain access to the community of other AI builders to share projects, get help, and find the best AI tools to use to enhance your workflows.
The course will be self-paced, so you can work through it at your leisure.
Videos will begin releasing the week of January 6th, and I’ll aim to have the whole foundational curriculum done within 3 weeks.
From there, I’ll keep adding bonus units on whatever other topics are interesting.
You can get $100 off until Monday using coupon code "BLOG"
Here’s the link to join: https://build-your-own-life-coach.circle.so/checkout/access
And when you join, be sure to say hi, share any requests, and share any places you’ve gotten stuck trying to do this in the past. I’m heavily tailoring it towards the interests and pain-points of the group.
FAQs
Do I need to know anything about coding to take this?
No, I’m going to start with a blank computer and build up the knowledge for you from there, so even if you have no experience you’ll be able to work through the course. I’ll also show you how to get help on your own and how to ask questions as you go so that you can build this knowledge base for yourself.
I’m already a decent coder, is this going to be too basic?
I’ll split up the videos so that if there’s a topic you’re already familiar with (e.g. using GitHub) you can skip it to get to the material you already know.
Do I need to be on Mac? Windows?
The software will work on both!
Will I need to pay for a bunch of AI subscriptions?
Only Cursor.ai for $20 a month.
What if I don’t want to build the life coach app?
That’s fine! I picked this as the project because it lets us cover a variety of important topics for building your own software, and at the very least you might find it useful in your work. If you have something very specific you want to build you can speed through the material, then start hacking on your own app and re-watch videos on any parts where you get stuck.
How long will the course take to complete?
I’m aiming to make the foundational core piece of it 5-10 hours, with another 10-20 hours of additional modules beyond that which you can pick and choose from based on your interests.
Can I pay with crypto?
Yes! You can pay nateliason.base.eth on Base, nateliason.eth for ETH mainnet or any other L2, or J8WdfJYXVc2ceHz8kNiWo6usSm7LKvVHKt7BWuCr9zYq on Solana. Once you’ve paid, DM me on Twitter with your email address and the transaction link.
If I run into issues, will you help me?
Yes assuming you’ve already tried to fix the issue following the advice in the course. One of the first things I’ll teach you is how to debug your problems using these AI tools, but if you run into a wall even after doing that I’ll help you fix it.
Is this just a Custom GPT?
No not at all. This is an app running on your computer that you could deploy to the web for other people to use, or even put on the App Store.
What language will we be programming in?
Predominantly Javascript, using React Native and Expo as the foundation. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry!
Are you going to use Replit? Bolt?
No, I’m going to teach you how to do everything on your computer so you don’t have to rely on a dumbed down web sandbox. You’ll be able to build just as quickly, your code will be cleaner, and it will be much easier to deploy and maintain. Plus you’ll feel cool doing it.
Is this browser based?
No we’ll be doing everything locally on your computer.
I have a question you didn’t answer
Put it on the comments and I’ll answer it there!
Would we be asking Cursor to write code? I am not sure how a non-coder like me could build this app without learning the basics of coding.
Would that mean we will promote the Cursor app to write the app and code for us and we tinker on top of it?
great idea. i really liked your roam research course (which I still use heavily), so i’m really interested to try your new course out. one question: i’ve been playing with python so far and i thought it would make most sense to stay in this programming language. you have decided to use other languages. how useful is it to combine python and javascript? isn’t this an overkill for a finance person that just wants more control over my ai related projects?