I Tried AI Coding Tools. Now I Want to Learn to Code.

As AI races ahead, we try to step back from the fray every once in a while. Each quarter, we gather for a "think week” to reflect on our work from the previous quarter and come up with new ideas that we can build to keep delivering an incredible experience for our readers. In the meantime, we’re re-republishing five pieces by Katie Parrot with insights on how AI is changing our professional lives. Yesterday we re-upped her piece about o3's talents as a career coach. Today we're running Katie's account of how using vibe coding tools led her to want to learn to write her own software.—Kate Lee

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One night last month, instead of booting up my Switch for another thrilling session of Stardew Valley, I decided I wanted to play a different kind of game. I decided I wanted to build an app.

It sounds crazy to say that so casually. Sure, I’m just going to throw together a quick MVP. I don’t write code. I don’t read code. But yeah, why not?

Two hours later, I had a minimum viable product ready to ship.

Thus was my introduction to the world of “vibe coding.” With AI-powered coding tools like Cursor, Replit, and my personal favorite, Lovable, anyone—even someone like me, with zero programming experience—can build functional applications just by describing what they want. In other words, based on the vibes.

Of course, any technology shift this massive has its pitfalls and tradeoffs, and we’ll talk about those. But ultimately, it worked—for my modest use case, at least. It knocked down the mental block that has kept me away from software development since I became aware it was an option in high school. And if the buzz on my X feed and other corners of the internet I frequent is any indication, we’re in the middle of, well, a vibe shift.

I used to hate being told to “learn to code.” I was defensive of the skills I already had. At the same time, I was afraid in that small, sneaky way that makes you avoid things that might reveal an uncomfortable truth. What if I couldn’t hack it—literally or figuratively? What if I wasn’t wired for this kind of thinking?

For a long time, the way I dealt with this was simple: I ignored it. I stuck to what I was good at. I worked around engineers, but I never wanted to be one. And I certainly didn’t want to hear, yet again, that learning to code was some kind of universal career insurance policy.

Now that I’ve spent some time playing around with AI tools, though, I can’t believe I’m saying this: I kind of wish I knew how to code.

My first hit and the AI high

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, some backstory: How did I, an English and German Literature major, find myself staying up until 2 a.m. wrangling APIs and edge functions? I blame Every.

We have this thing called Think Week: a week per quarter where everybody at Every takes time off from their regular job tasks to explore ideas that don’t fit neatly into their daily work. One of the assignments in our most recent Think Week was to try an AI tool we’d never used before.

I’d been meaning to redo my website for a while. The one I had was a holdover from 2017, built in Weebly, back when WYSIWYG was the hotness. It was functional but clunky, a relic from a time when I thought “owning your platform” meant cobbling something together with drag-and-drop tools.

So when our engineering lead Andrey Galko suggested I check out Lovable, a new AI-powered app builder that bills itself as “the last piece of software,” I figured, why not? I pulled up the site, created an account, and when the chat window opened up, I typed a single prompt:

"Create a website for a writer, editor, and content strategist who specializes in thought leadership for early-stage startups, builders, and VCs."

Seconds later, Lovable spit out something eerily close to what I wanted—clean, polished, professional. Maybe a little “B2B SaaS 101” in its aesthetics, but miles better than anything I’d ever been able to put together.

And then I felt it: a rush of satisfaction. A flicker of pride. The sudden, thrilling recognition that I had made something. “Look at that. I built that,” I thought. And then: “What can I build next?”

Scope creep and the slippery slope

So I got ambitious. The contact page on my old website was just my email address in static text. This time, I wanted something more sophisticated—a real, live contact form that potential clients could fill out and would get routed to my inbox. Maybe I could even get it to send an automated email in reply.

Next thing I knew, I was juggling a comic book movie cast’s worth of tools—none of which I would have touched even a month ago:

1. Lovable (the AI website builder)
2. GitHub (where code lives)
3. Supabase (a backend database solution I barely understand)
4. OpenAI (makers of top LLMs like ChatGPT-4.5)
5. Resend (for sending emails, theoretically)
6. Zapier (for tying things into my workflow)