Every AI Coder Hits This Wall — Here’s How I Broke Through

Vibe coding is the biggest gateway drug that development has ever seen. It is bananas, but it's also a double-edged sword. I want to be very honest with you and myself on something that's tough to hear. So, you may hate this video, but I hope you like the lesson that I've learned and hopefully you'll find it interesting. So, skill gaps, let's talk about them and the process that you need to do to address them. So, we know the Vibe Post that came out and took the world by shock. The reality is it's been the best gateway drug in the world to getting new coders in the door because the barrier is lower than ever, but the struggle to production is still a huge problem. Everybody that I talked to, both in our community with Vibe with AI and just friends that are getting into this space, they're so excited because they've made their first thing. And the hello world now is much better than it used to be. It used to be that Hello World was, you know, your first lesson. Think about when I was 15 and starting to learn how to code and just couldn't figure it out. But then you get Hello World. Now Hello World is a marketing site or a game of mind sweeper or chess and it's crazy and that's awesome. But then making that leap to production and all that's really hard. So I would just, you know, we need to be honest with ourselves where the guy who wrote it, he's been doing AI for 20 years. He literally invented the class at Stanford, which is crazy, right? He invented the class of convolutional neural networks for visual recognition in 2011. He's also a founding member at OpenAI, also led the computer vision team at Tesla. But it's okay because there's tactics that you can use to learn around this. I mean there's literally no better time to learn because if you do the research on this I did a bunch of it around what is the time to productivity for engineers then it's usually about a year and that's after them doing all their studying like this would be a fresh grad not a boot camp we never hired boot camp people I'm sorry if you did a boot camp and you're offended think it's great that you did it there's a huge trend during 2021 when was happening. But it's on average based on research with Grock, OI, deep research with Gemini, and then just phone calls because I think those are more important to me because I can get real in the field stuff. And then also just from hiring people like I grew a team to 30 both remote and maybe it was like 20 and then also when we got acquired dealing with more engineers like this is the thing that you should be caring about is what's your time to productivity that's on the hiring side if you're hiring engineers or if you are getting better and you're trying to be productive. So, one thing to just caution is that you want to have a big filter on the stuff that you're reading. So, if you see something and you're like, "Hey, this just killed that." Be careful because a lot of the time it's just marketers. And how do you fix this? You kind of just look at how things have been done. And all these tools that are out there, they map to different steps in the process. I've talked about that before. But the next step is actually just recognizing what are your skill gaps. So, let's see. In my case, I actually wrote these in my to-do list. So, I'm going to just write these out. And this comes from going and doing the thing that you're trying to build. So, what I would do if I were you, and this is really the bulk of this video. So, let's make this larger is skill gaps. And you get this by trying to do the build, by trying to make something. So in my case, I know that my skills in unit testing are not great. Unit testing in Python and I can just say Python in general because I'm competent in Typescript but not Python, but I'm scaling up on Python. So as I go through this list, I know Cypress tests and then we'll talk about how to address these. I know that what other ones did I write? Behavioral tests. I want to talk about I want to learn more about Python architecture and then fast API and then Google agents. I forget it's like the ak I want to say it's that. So then the next question is okay cool. I recognize that I have some skill gaps and then how do I address these? And I would only go after your skill gaps and the things that you're actually building for. So it's just in time learning because that way you're not only more incentivized to go after it, but there's a lot of stuff you just won't need to know. I wouldn't crack open a book. I've I've done that and then it's super boring. So then I would just take some combination of get let's say methods to traverse the skill gap and this is where filtering matters a lot because you can go and watch YouTube videos but you need to have a good filter. So I would say like YouTube videos of people who have proof that they know are they proof that they're doing what you want to do. What does that mean? If they're in academia and they've never built something that's generating cash, because I'm assuming you're trying to build something to generate cash, either for yourself or a company, then they're really in this bucket because they're going to teach you a lot of theory and you're going to be pretty bored. So if there's someone that's a CTO of a company or they've been someone that's done something like I don't know they have a history of building stuff like myself then that's probably a qualified lead or qualified source. Other ones are things that I do is I go on to GitHub repositories. So I do GitHub repo plus search operator. So in my case if I want to learn fast API then what I can do is I will go into Google and I'll do fast API documentation and I'll come into here and let's see the metadata. Let's go into learn. Actually we want the reference. Sorry we'll pull up the reference and we will look for some sort of import statement. So maybe like this. So I can look for something within the topic that I'm trying to traverse the skill gap with. So in my case, I actually need web hooks. Open API web hooks. That looks pretty good. Which one would make most sense? This is normally called a web hook. Fast API class. So in this class you have Oh, how cool. But you can see I'm starting that journey, right? Let's see these websockets. So I'll come into here and I'll usually spend a little while actually reading through. So I did this yesterday with tan stack start where I wanted to get a brief understanding of it. I built something without the docs that gave me the inspiration to then go use the docs. So now I'll come into GitHub and we'll make it bigger so you guys can see. And I'll do a search with just this and let's see what comes up. So, we have 78,000 examples. And this is kind of wild, but I'll start just searching around in here. And maybe I'll maybe I'll type in how about this fast API. Is it one word? Let's do this. So, it's what I'm looking for is a repo that has a lot of likes on it or stars. So fast and durable pub sub channel peridio's take on it and what I'm doing now is I'm just kind of looking around and GitHub is the best place on earth to do this looking around for code. It's actually really fun. Like I see people hate on the feed and I'm like I think you're just not that interested in what you do because for me it's like better than Instagram. It's like I just see stuff I'm like oh my gosh. And I star it. I actually have people hit me up that are like dude I follow your stars. So, let's see this fast API broadcast. This one looks interesting because let's see. I also want something that's kind of recent. So, let's see something that is recently updated. Here's a websocket. Look at this guy go. Chill out, man. 13 seconds ago. But I'll start looking around and then I'm not going to make you sit here and watch watch me find one. But it it looks something like this. And then you can do the same thing with search operators. So, if you typed in language and then you could do Python and then you could do fast API. This is a little bit overkill, but there's a bunch of different search operators. You can do stars and then add the values. So, I can do stars greater than 500 and I'll do fast API. So, I'll see all the popular ones. What's this guy doing? How do I translate this? No. Google Translate is H. That's tough. Now I really want to know what are they up to? What are they doing? Google Translate. No. Huh. It's a waste of time for you guys. Sorry. But it's that process of traversing the skill gap. So then you'd go and you'd read it and you go down. It's a rabbit. But I only classify it as a rabbit hole if it's a negative thing. It's really you're just following the curiosity trail. How about that for a coin that term? And what you'll find is it's okay because you are learning and as long as you can kind of stay the path and then once you found the thing that you need to do immediately jump back into your IDE, put it into use. That's how you learn. That's way more enjoyable. I've done a lot of different methods. I've made flash cards when I was remembering like what do all the HTTP requests mean? Like I don't know what a 403 is or whatever. I had flash cards. I had a rubber band on my arm that I'd snap myself with if I was using AI cuz I wanted to get better. There's a lot of different ways, but first step is recognize the skill gap. And then you might not even know the name of it. So you can just ask questions around it. what does this mean if I was explaining this to a friendly developer of mine or a friend who's a developer and it'll put it into layman's terms and you'll find what that search term would be and then once you've identified a list of those you just write them down put them on a notepad and then each day make it a practice it's like for 30 minutes honestly you could even say for five minutes because that's a trick like you subconsciously know you're tricking yourself but it still works for oh it's 5 minutes and then you're in it whereas 30, you're like, "Oh." But then you're taking those off and you're jumping around and you're learning and you're having fun. And this has been really helpful for our community. If you want to check that out out, it's called Vibe with AI. It's this thing right here. It's half off right now cuz I built a new platform and it's going to have a bunch of AI stuff in it, which would be sick. But if you like the video and if you like coffee, then you can like the video. If you don't like coffee, what's wrong with you? You should you should like it and subscribe to the channel for more content like this. And I'll see you in the next one.