I started building with ChatGPT the week it launched. A couple of years later, I was teaching nearly 500 engineers how to do the same.
Here's how that happened.
Early days
In November 2022, I was a Staff Engineer at a startup. ChatGPT had just dropped and I immediately started experimenting. Not to generate code, but to understand what was possible. I would paste in modules I was working on and ask it to explain what was happening, then use it to review my code before submitting PRs. Within weeks, it had completely replaced Stack Overflow for me. It was not just answering questions. It was teaching me things in the context of my actual codebase.
Nobody was calling it a strategy yet. It was just a novelty to most, but I had identified real value and was determined to master the tool. It reminded me of the early internet, where you could suddenly find information that was previously only available at the library.
Getting vocal
I kept going deeper, using AI tools daily while many people were still skeptical. When I joined BambooHR in late 2023, I started pushing to open up better options and got increasingly vocal about what was possible.
Eventually, leadership got onboard. A VP asked me to do a live-coding demo in front of the entire R&D department at a company onsite. I built a complete application in minutes using Windsurf. Watching it get written right in front of everyone's eyes was something else entirely. Even I was impressed.
Building the course
That demo changed the conversation. I volunteered to build and teach an AI training program. My first conversation about teaching the course was the week before the first session. I was building the curriculum the same week we delivered it. When demand grew, we scaled to three classes, four days a week. I was writing lessons late into the night and teaching them the next morning.
What started as one director's team grew into institutional training for nearly 500 people. The recordings became standard onboarding material for all new hires.
The human side
After the course, I took it on as my personal mission to help transform the company into an AI-first organization. I recognized that the best way to do that would be to ignite passion in people one at a time through targeted education, right at the point it was most relevant: in their current work.
One thing I learned: the biggest challenge in any AI adoption effort is the human side. Change is hard, especially when it touches how people have built their careers. I spent a lot of time advocating for what I call the "AI operator" mentality: AI is not going to take your job. It is going to supercharge your abilities.
Going independent
Eventually, the pace of what I wanted to build outgrew what any large organization could support. So I went independent. I started building the tools myself.
That is where I am now. Building AI-powered development tools and real applications full-time, applying everything I learned from over three years of daily AI development and teaching nearly 500 engineers.
The people who will lead this shift are not the ones who waited for permission. They are the ones who started early, stayed consistent, and kept building.
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