Five days in. Let me tell you what actually happened this week.

I launched my personal site: my-nomads.pages.dev

Home page. Journey log. Resources. Shop. About. All of it — live on the internet.

And five days ago, I had never written a single line of code in my life.

What I actually used

VS Code. GitHub. Cloudflare Pages. Astro. And Claude as my co-pilot for every single step.

No bootcamp. No YouTube rabbit holes. No $2,000 course.

Just: “here’s what I want to build” → Claude explains → I execute → something breaks → Claude fixes → repeat.

The mistake that taught me the most

At one point, my site broke and I had no idea why.

I’d been copying code from Claude into MarkText first — saving it as a .md file — then pasting into VS Code.

Seemed logical. Turned out to be the problem.

MarkText treats - as a markdown formatting symbol. So every - in my code silently disappeared. The code looked fine. It wasn’t.

The fix was simple: copy code directly into VS Code. No middleman.

Twenty minutes of confusion. One sentence of explanation. That’s how this works.

What I actually think about all this

There’s a story people tell about coding — that it’s a special skill, reserved for a certain kind of person.

I don’t think that’s true anymore.

What AI has done isn’t just make coding easier. It’s made the thinking part accessible. The part where you figure out what you want to build, how to structure it, what matters. That used to require years of technical context. Now it requires clarity about what you’re trying to do.

I’m not a developer. But I shipped a website this week.

That gap between “I can’t” and “I did” — that’s what I’m documenting here.

This week’s numbers

• Site pages live: 5
• Gumroad products uploaded: 2
• X followers: 0 to building
• Revenue: $0

Showing the zeros matters. Everyone starts here.

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Next up: updating the real Gumroad product links on the shop page, and figuring out how to get the first 100 eyes on this.