Path
Hobbyists
You build things on weekends because building things on weekends is what makes you happy. The skill ceiling just got a lot higher.
You don't need to be sold on building things. You're already doing it. The reason this curriculum exists for you is that the gap between what you can imagine and what you can actually ship has narrowed by an order of magnitude in the last two years, and most of us are still building like the gap is what it used to be.
If you finished Internet Menace v1, this is the next chapter. If you didn't, you can start here. Either way, the path assumes you'll work on it when you feel like it, and finish when you finish.
Small Business Website
Five pages, a contact form, a domain. Live by Sunday.
Open template →What “shipped” looks like: A weird single-purpose tool that solves a problem only you have, hosted on a domain only you visit, that works because you built it that way.
Time to functional: Functional in a few rainy weekends, give or take. The reading is bounded; the building takes whatever time you give it, and you'll probably enjoy giving it more.
Use these guides in this order, hobbyists.
The shortest path through. Read the five sections below across a few rainy weekends, ship a thing you wanted to exist, decide what to build next.
Start Here
The pitch in 800 words: the imagination-to-shipping gap has collapsed for hobbyists, and here's what to do about it.
~15 min read02Read This
The five things that have to be true before AI lets you build things you couldn't build before, instead of building the same things faster.
~25 min read03Set Up Your Tools
The minimum software setup. A laptop you already have, two free signups, and a $20 subscription that pays for itself the first weekend you use it.
~1 hr setup, after dinner04Write Your First Spec
The worked example: turn "I want a thing that pings me when my favorite obscure band plays a show within 100 miles" into a spec an agent can build.
~45 min write, on the couch05Ship This Thing
Hand the spec to the agent, watch it work, deploy the result somewhere only you'll see it. Tell somebody you built it; that's half the joy.
~3 hrs build, rainy Saturday