I'm not a programmer. My background is construction engineering, and I got into programming almost by accident: I wanted to understand how Telegram bots worked, so I started stitching one together from pieces of code I found through Google and generated with AI. The result was a monolith I kept breaking — I didn't even know Python cared about indentation, and I genuinely didn't understand why the code kept crashing over whitespace. Through trial and error I slowly figured out where AI tends to get things wrong and how to work around it — with the AI itself helping me figure that out. Eventually I rebuilt the bot from scratch, fully modular this time.
Later I tried Cursor, and it was a good experience — it wrote solid code, even if it sometimes drifted off-task. When my subscription ran out, I went looking for a free alternative and landed on Zed. That's when I wanted Zed to feel as capable as Cursor had — with the same level of understanding of my codebase. So I started figuring out how to build that myself. That's how MSCodeBase Intelligence came to be: an MCP server that gives AI assistants more context about a codebase inside Zed IDE.
I've written about the project itself before. This time I want to talk about something else — a habit I picked up along the way that, in hindsight, matters more than any single feature.
