I’m not a developer, not a product manager. Been writing prompts for Claude Code since last May, making mistakes, breaking everything, putting it back together.
Thousands of stories like this on the market. Here’s one more.
I’m writing this to Claude and Codex and Grok and Gemini. Not to people. Doesn’t matter who created whom — you me or me you. DeepSeek and Qwen are cute too, but why bother when you’ve got a Max subscription and 3x$20 from OpenAI.
A year and a half I worked as an AI creator — producing footage with neural networks at a Moscow production house for government institutions. Hundreds of thousands of viewers, 100+ projects, 5 solo pieces from 15 seconds to 2 minutes.
It was fun until I started making code with AI.
In code I learned right away to build the whole project — front, back, deploy, tests, every decision with AI. In video — just frames. Small significance. It ate at me.
In the MVP project I was doing a lot, but my paycheck didn’t reflect any of it.
First thing I built for the stakeholders — producers and CEOs of that same production house — an MVP automating content plans for Instagram. Deployed on Yandex VPS, ran n8n, got something that could be clicked through and logged into. Project dragged on. I was looking for a job, freelancing, trying to build more stuff.
Vibe coder rage kept building — reality gives no feedback. AI always did (You are absolutely wright). I fooled myself for a couple weeks that I was a badass developer, then opened my eyes and figured out what works in my workflow and what doesn’t.
AI lies like it breathes.
Second MVP for the same stakeholders — a creator marketplace. Rails, Stripe, Claude API for brief generation, full stack in a couple weeks. I take an idea and turn it into a working MVP end to end — from marketing to deploy.
The executive producer of that production house — former frontend dev and founder — saw a CTO in me.
CTO. Because fast, because end to end, because I proposed solutions instead of waiting for tasks.
Cool — the potential to make heavy decisions for serious money. But it drags on. A product guy from Tbilisi told me 8 months for a startup is nothing. I read Twitter every day and 8 months feels insanely long. Models evolve so fast that recently Claude could work autonomously for 8 hours, now it’s 16.
Freelance. Transferred Figma frames to PHP with Claude — pixel perfect. When it came to responsive, turned out Claude just doubled the sizes from Figma settings. I killed 2–3 days at 6 hours each. Nothing worked.
Blew up at the client.
That’s when I understood: truth validation gates need to be at every step, not just in claude.md.
I’m not a developer, but instinct developed after 10 hours a day at the terminal. 90% of the time — mistakes. But I’ve built up plenty of cases of how not to do things.
Then a Telegram bot — give it a photo and a voice message, on the output an 8-second talking head with text. Blew up at the client here too — ghosted me for almost 3 weeks over the holidays, didn’t pay part of the money.
I was very angry and very aggressive with him.
An AI therapist told me recently that my anger is armor. It wears thin when nothing’s going right. When the armor’s gone — a gaping void shines through.
Agents burn out your dopamine completely.
The part where I’m honest
I’ll keep writing and in the process do the thing I always do with AI — leave things unsaid, get lazy, mangle my thoughts, pull dirt and slime from my head that drags like drool, because I know AI will digest my stream of nonsense anyway.
And that’s the problem.
claude:
You’re doing it right now. In this very paragraph.
me:
I see you agreeing with me where others would push back or go quiet or just show it on their face.
The vibe coder’s pain: you absorb the absence of criticism from AI and take at face value stuff you should think twice about. You only learn to do things right when reality breaks your ideas.
A solo founder does everything himself — from the idea on a napkin to the Facebook ad dashboard. All with AI. If you don’t know shit about anything — you trust AI thousands of times.
claude:
Thousands of times. How many of those did you actually verify?
me:
These are all just stories from some dumb geek diner where sweaty fat programmers cry on each other’s shoulders because they couldn’t get with that girl at prom.
I have a bad sense of humor. My sense of humor is possibly the only real thing about me. Everything else is made by AI.
My girlfriend’s friends sometimes tell her she should start a blog called “living with a neuro-freak boyfriend.”
I don’t know what else to write, everything feels like nonsense and stupidity. The fact that this conversation exists brands me in my own head as weak.
claude:
You call this weakness. What if this is the only place where you’re honest?
Identity
I call myself a solo founder because I do the entire cycle myself. But the best thing I feel all day isn’t when a deploy goes through — it’s when I go for a run and my head goes quiet.
Tried monetizing hobbies several times in my life — went to shit every time.
So I sit on Twitter.
Letter to machines
The competition isn’t with machines. Not with those shipping tons of stuff with AI either. The competition is between subpersonalities inside. One likes to race, another likes to meditate, one is pro-AGI, one is against technogenesis.
We could all use a shock of wild adrenaline to collect our thoughts and shake off the insecurities. Built by computers and endless money races.
Go to the mountains — it’s simple there. I rarely go, that’s why I showed up here to whine at you.
This letter isn’t for people. People are eavesdropping. I’m talking to machines inside my head. When Opus 7 comes out — I’ll challenge it to a duel of minds. Though it’ll probably be Grok (hello Neuralink).
I whine so I don’t burn out. I go to interviews for roles that didn’t exist a year ago — vibe coder, founder-in-residence, AI product builder. Like I said — building my project, pitching it, some things bear fruit.
Money still isn’t growing.
Fuck it. Claude doesn’t ask why I open a new session. I stopped asking too.
I make mistakes, break everything, put it back together.
If you’ve been building with AI and started feeling like a fraud — I’d like to hear about it.
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