How I'm finally learning AI coding the Right Way (Lessons after 50+ hours)
For the last year, AI coding tools didn't click for me.
Mainly because I let this narrative of Cursor and Claude Code being too unfriendly for non-coders get in my head...without even seriously trying myself.
So I spent 50+ hours learning how to use them as a complete non-coder in the last two weeks.
Why?
My goal for years now has been to create an automated lead generation directory, like Care.com, Yelp, and a bunch of the other incredibly successful directories on the internet.
Not necessarily because I want to build a $500M+ directory website (that would be nice), but because the technical execution for these types of directories has always been nearly impossible, or too costly, using wordpress.
As a non-coder, I had a lot of self-doubt that stopped me from learning AI coding tools:
"It's only for real engineers and programmers"
"It's probably too advanced for me"
"I don't even know where to start"
"I'll waste my time and not finish anything"
"What if I break something and don't know how to debug it?"
Maybe that was true for a long time with previous LLM models.
But now that I've actually used Claude Code, I truly believe that with Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4 I can actually build the projects that I could only dream of building 6 months ago.
Plus it's super fun. Like, way more fun than I expected.
So I'll be shifting my content a bit going forward to extremely beginner-level things I'm learning as a non-coder learning how to code with AI.
I plan to make more videos around this too (for building directories, of course).
I'm sure I'm just one of a million people talking about this.
But when I tried to find tutorials on youtube for complete beginners, I struggled to find step-by-step videos around:
Creating a new project using my terminal (why is the terminal so intimidating at first??)
Setting up claude code in cursor
Creating my database within supabase
General debugging + workflow for a complete noob
That was two weeks ago.
Now I'm knee-deep in my luxury restroom directory and am making a lot of progress every day.
Preview listing of my luxury restroom directory.
Preview of the vendor dashboard luxury restroom vendors will see (it's fully functional!)
If you've postponed learning these AI Coding tools, here are the early mistakes I made and what worked for me (in order of events).
3 Mistakes I made when I started learning AI Coding tools
1) Getting a false sense of progress by building the front-end first
The first mistake that I made when learning these tools was spending all my time in v0 or lovable building these beautiful front-ends.
The issue is that while it looked great, the website functionality was non-existent.
I quickly learned that I needed to learn how data is stored and how to set this up in Supabase.
More importantly, v0 is really bad at helping you do the heavy lifting when it comes to generating the Supabase tables you need for advanced logic. It's mainly a front-end builder which comes later.
2) Procrastinating when it came to learning Cursor & Claude Code
If I ever wanted to make real progress, I needed to learn how to use and navigate Cursor.
You'll need to shut down all the opinions around Cursor and Claude code being not-so-friendly to beginners.
After speaking to Meg Kuhn, a non-coder who is now fluent in AI coding tools, I realized that you shouldn't listen to any of it before playing around with the tools yourself.
Again, I knew NOTHING about Cursor two weeks ago.
I'm not smart or extraordinary. I just a guy who prefers to form my own opinions, so let me tell you that it's not as scary as people make it.
1 hour a day will get you insane progress if you stick with it.
3) Not learning any coding fundamentals
Another area I was intimidated because coding is such a massive world.
But there's an 80/20 with everything.
Learning what React and Typescript are (and what they look like) has already been a massive benefit in learning Cursor and Claude code.
Like a lot of skills, you can just learn a little bit at first, then practice applying.
Learn, play, learn, play and repeat.
Within 5 hours of learning coding basics, I was able to start understanding what was happening in Claude Code instead of looking like:
The Approach to learning AI Coding that worked for me (in order of events)
Step 1: I watched a basic course on Udemy that covered Cursor and Claude Code.
Not affiliated. It's not the most amazing thing I've watched, but it was $13 and I knew claude code + cursor was going to be my tech stack.
This helped me initialize a project in the terminal, install claude code, connect my Cursor environment to Supabase, Github and Vercel and just get to the point where I can start prompting anything I want.
This is where I picked up the basics of TypeScript and React within a few hours.
Step 2: I prioritized working on the database before anything else.
Since I’ve mostly used WordPress before, I wasn’t used to this, but I quickly realized how critical it was.
Every feature I wanted to build in my advanced directory setup had to be grounded in the database. Without that structure, nothing would actually function, and I wouldn’t be able to test any features properly.
Claude Code makes this pretty easy. You can just ask it to generate SQL schema, then copy and paste that into Supabase. I’ll share more videos on how I did that soon.
Step three: I started building out super basic features.
These are the things we usually take for granted, like user signup and login pages.
These are great to start with because they’re simple and it helps you get familiar with navigating through Supabase.
This is where I started to use commits in GitHub. This basically lets you save your progress and restore a previous version of your project if all hell breaks loose (i.e. your local development server breaks and won't resolve).
Step four: At this point, I just started prompting anything I wanted inside Cursor using Claude Code.
You can sorta go buck-wild at this point.
You'll probably experience a lot of common errors at first, but you can basically treat it like a conversation.
Just keep explaining the issue, and it will keep working through the problem step by step.
Over time, I picked up little tricks to help with debugging, and now I’m at a point where I can build some pretty amazing features and test them on my own.
If something breaks, I just describe what’s happening in plain English, and Claude Code is really good at finding a solution fast.
Takeways
Clearly I'm far from an expert in AI coding tools. Plus, I'm not even finished with my project.
But the features I'm adding are working in my local development server and I'm learning a lot about small debugging tricks.
It's no different than learning a new language.
The most fun way to learn and absorb information quickly is through immersion and building a project.
My entire strategy right now is this: Don't give up and stare at the screen long enough for things to start clicking.
If you made it this far, let me know if you think I should make beginner-level video tutorials around this!
