Growing up with the home computers of the 80's, I had to learn to code to get anything done. In dark rooms or basements we typed in the programs, or loaded them from a C-60 tape recorder. Basic, Pascal, PHP and some Z80 assembly language. Fun times.
Now I find myself equipped with a full-stack senior software developer with 20+ years experience who takes care of all the coding for me. It's is a truly surreal experience.
The tools are called Cline, v0.dev, Replit or Lovable. You tell it what you want - and it will code for you. My kids, who never used a phone with a cord, finds this perfectly normal. Since I know what goes on "under the hood" I'm speechless and in awe.
This has to be one of mankinds greatest achievements on par with the wheel, the steam engine, electricity, radio transmission, nuclear fusion - and now Large Language Models, or AI's as we call them.
Claude, Gemini, chatGPT, Mistral, Grok - this technology is extremely hard to grasp. I tried and did not understand a single word. Financial Times produced the best visual explanation of the core idea, Generative AI exists because of the transformer - recommended to understand the fundamental concepts of AI technology.
I plugged in Cline into my code editor - suddenly I had the support of a master developer on a level I can only dream about.
I used it to build a browser-based front-end for n8n workflows. I simply told my AI assistant Cline "Build a chat front-end using React"... and it was a done deal.
A complete React/Vite app, adaptive for mobile and desktop, live on Railway with a one-click deploy. Never in my wildest dreams.
Iterating I enabled session management, Microsoft Entra log-in, Markdown rendering, file management, chart rendering, persistent sessions. My Cline assistant kept grinding away, flawlessly.
And then we created tools for the n8n Agent back-end: world time, sending e-mails, researching the web, creating blog posts, S3 file management.
I'm still thinking 'this can not work, it's not possible.' And somehow, it still is. And we're at 1.0 with AI at the moment. What a time to be alive.
