I've been building software for almost twenty years, and for most of that time I thought learning a new technology followed a fairly predictable process. First you studied the framework, then you read the documentation, maybe bought a course, watched a few tutorials, built a small demo, and only after that did you start working on the project you actually wanted to build. It always felt like the responsible way to learn, so I never questioned it.
A few months ago I started a personal side project that eventually became OToolbox (https://otoolbox.com), a collection of free browser-based tools for things like image resizing, PDF conversion, URL shortening and developer utilities. The problem was that I barely knew the stack I wanted to use. I had never built anything with Next.js, my React experience was almost non-existent and Tailwind CSS was just another framework I'd seen in other people's repositories. A few years ago I would have spent several weeks learning the technology before writing a single line of code. This time I decided to do the opposite.
I started building immediately and used AI whenever I got stuck. At first I thought the biggest benefit would simply be writing code faster. It certainly helped with that, but after a few weeks I realised something much more interesting had happened. AI hadn't really changed how I programmed. It had changed what my job actually looked like.
