From Abacus to AI: Small Potatoes, Big Results

I’ll share my real, month-long journey as a complete non-coder who used today’s AI tools (like Grok, Copilot, Claude Haiku, and especially Claude Sonnet) to build actual working things: two World of Warcraft in-game addons for my uncles to track character stats and items automatically, a “Next Bus” app for our island’s private bus routes (pulling schedules from PDFs and images), and a simple dinner-bell phone app that rings my phone when someone hits bell button their phone.

The talk walks through the messy reality — starting with total confusion (SQL commas feeling like ancient abacus work, AWS looking like a blurry PS2 game, pasting code line-by-line and debugging parentheses I didn’t understand), failing a lot, switching models when one got stuck, and eventually getting functional apps and addons.

I’ll show how I “failed faster” by iterating quickly, using my own low-tech version control (100+ numbered folders), and leaning on different AIs for different strengths. It’s not about becoming a pro developer overnight — it’s about an ordinary person getting useful results with zero prior experience.