It's Never Too Late · The AI Advantage

It's Never Too Late

We've all heard how powerful an idea can be. I had a new one, back in March of this year. It was for an app, and at the time, I thought Apple's App Store was the only way to go. And I thought Apple would only accept apps written in their Swift language. So I tried to learn Swift. It took over a month of lessons on YouTube to realize I couldn't learn programming. Not fast enough. At 77, I'd never programmed anything beyond my VCR. Then I saw a guy on You Tube talking about using AI to write the code. He actually put together a simple app in 15 minutes on the internet! OK, it looked doable. So, April 20, I decided to dive in. It was tough at first. I was using an AI named Claude, in an IDE called Cursor. For two weeks, on weekends, I sat in my room for about 16 hours each day, hitting wall after wall. I didn't know how to work with this Claude "guy." Didn't know he had no memory, unless he was told to. Didn't know he had a way of barging ahead with his idea of what should be done to the app I'd designed and he was coding. It took two weeks of that, climbing a steep learning curve, for me. Then, in early May, I realized I was the jockey of this incredibly fast, smart thoroughbred machine. That's my analogy. It's like that—a fast, energy-infused racehorse that has to be taught, controlled, directed, held back at times, etc. Once I realized that and held the reins firmly, the clouds parted. (Cue: angel choir.)

A month later, my first app was completed, tested and ready to go. It's been submitted to Apple. Then, I kept having ideas hit me so fast I could hardly keep up. Now, I'm using Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, Warp, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Lovable and Rocket, and I've got one app active on the internet (not in App Store) named HomeStagerPro.ai (it adds digital furnishings to empty or under-furnished room photos) two others almost ready, and more in my head ready to come out.

But I'm worse than LAME at marketing. I'll be 78 next month and I want to quit my daytime "retirement" job. I want to generate some consistent income! So, I'm hoping this program will offer some marketing info for this modern age.

But, the point of this post is this: Don't push away from AI because it's complicated. If you take one step at a time and realize what you're dealing with, it's enjoyable and rewarding to learn. And if you're old, like me, that doesn't matter. You don't have to do the thinking for the machine—you just have to know how to tell it what you want done. It's very easy to learn that part.

Good luck to all. I'm looking forward to learning more alongside all of you!

22 comments