Don’t be afraid to make a mess and learn

My journey with ai has been slow, messy and exploratory. I started playing with chatgpt (OpenAI) a few years - nothing serious, just helping write > research > automate; then claude entered the villa and turned my head with connectors to google workspace; then fast forward to openclaw, and that’s where i’d say i truly got ai-pilled (mac mini and all).

I’m super curious by nature AND i’m a millennial, so i grew up in an era where i would jailbreak my phones and figure out “code” to make my myspace page theme pop off, so ofc i went all in tinkering with openclaw to see how far i could take it… quickly finding out what API, hosting, and tokens are and that it costs actual money (while i’m unemployed).

I’ve spent most of my time building some things to help myself, my partner or my friends, but mostly building stuff that is useless and didn’t work/scale past 2-3 users. Every week something new was shipped by the big ai players - it became hard to keep up, so I kept just making more messes to just try whatever was new, but never built anything i need to show anyone or for any actual business / organization… until last week.

Last week, i had a chat with an old colleague of mine and just yapping about pain points of operations (my background is cpg ops/supply chain) and how there is a lag in the ops-world understanding and adoption ai as a tool to help, not replace; i connected him to super smart technical people, and then we decided let’s try to see if there is something here and if we’re the right group of people to try to build something. I figured, with ai now and how easy it is to build a v1, why not try to build something - something simple to share when we all met. I bounced the idea off some more technical people and they encouraged me to just make a mess and build…

That process was mentally hard for me though - i realized i kept getting caught up in imposter syndrome because of how fast the space moves and being non-technical, i didn’t want to ship something terrible. So I ended up wasting time and blocking myself instead of just trying to build something:

“Something probably already exists” → I spent time using LLM’s to help identify competitive landscape

“I don’t know how to setup the infrastructure” → I spent time asking the LLM’s to help teach me

“I don’t have any real data to test from or try to use to find a gap” → I asked the LLM’s to help build simulated inboxes and agents

I built the demo … from idea to demo took me around 8 hours. And guess what, it wasn’t even used because our conversation as a group went a different direction on the core problem to be solved (which wasn’t the demo i built haha).

Did I feel like a failure? At first, yes, but then I went to climb in the beautiful squamish forest, and that evening i felt super excited. Why?

I have 0 technical background and i built a demo in 8 hours (half of that time spent chatting with claude and learning, not building)

I used a tool that I’ve never used before and am blown away (grokbot)

I shared an html demo with a group of technical jedis (never done that before)

So in the end… don’t be afraid to make a mess and learn!