Content, Code, and Learning to Keep Going
There’s this weird moment that happens when you’ve been making content for years. You look up, realize you’ve been at it for almost a decade, and somehow you still feel like you’re just getting started. That’s where I’m at. I’ve been writing articles for close to ten years now and making videos for around six, and it’s still a slow, awkward, beautiful grind trying to find the people who actually get what I’m trying to do.
Some days it clicks. Some days it feels like I’m yelling into the internet with a camera that’s judging me. I’ve always been nervous on video, always had 1,000 thoughts flying around in my head while I’m trying to form one coherent sentence. Recently, instead of forcing myself in front of the lens, I did something different. I stepped back from videos and fell into this new rabbit hole. Vibe coding, AI tools, and quietly rebuilding what I want my work to look like.
The Long Game of Creating Stuff on the Internet
When you tell someone you’ve been writing articles for a decade, it sounds impressive on paper. It doesn’t show them the drafts that never got published, the videos that died at 32 views, or the ideas that felt huge in your head and landed like a wet napkin in reality.
That’s the truth about making things online for years. In some places you win and in some places you lose. Most of the time, it’s not even that dramatic. You just… exist in that middle zone where you’re not “blowing up,” but you’re also not quitting. You just keep going. You keep posting. You keep tweaking. You keep wondering if the next thing will be the one that finally connects.
The hardest part isn’t the work, it’s the patience. It’s realizing that finding people who genuinely resonate with your content is a slow process, especially when you’re not trying to become a content machine or fake some persona just to chase views. It’s remembering that every person who does connect is a real human, not just a number on an analytics dashboard.
Being Awkward on Camera and Doing It Anyway
Let’s talk about the camera. I’m not the born to be on YouTube type. I’m the overthink every sentence, notice my own blinking, forget what I was saying mid-sentence type. I can feel my brain running 100 tabs at once while the red recording light is on, and none of them are labeled.
That nervousness doesn’t magically disappear just because you’ve been doing it for six years. You just get better at working around it. You learn little tricks. Record in shorter takes. Script more. Or script less. Talk like you’re explaining something to a friend, not auditioning for a tech commercial. Some days that works and some days you close the recording app and decide that’s it for the week.
Taking a break from making videos wasn’t me giving up, it was me hitting pause so I could figure out what I actually want to say and how I want to say it. There’s a huge difference between quitting and recalibrating. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do as a creator is step back, breathe, and admit, “Yeah, this isn’t flowing right now. I need to switch lanes for a bit.”
Discovering Vibe Coding and Having an AI Teacher on Call
While I was off-camera, I fell into something new. Coding, but in a way that felt fun, curious, and low-pressure. Vibe coding. Not “become a full‑stack engineer in 30 days,” but “let’s build something weird, learn as we go, and see what happens.”
The wild part is how different learning to code feels now that AI exists as an actual, usable teacher. Tools like OpenAI’s Codex, which can read, write, and refactor your code, turn the process into this back-and-forth where you don’t feel stuck for hours on one bug anymore. You ask a question in plain language, it suggests an approach, and you iterate together. It’s like having a senior dev sitting next to you, except you don’t feel guilty asking “dumb” questions.
Then you have models like Claude from Anthropic, which is really good at understanding longer context, explaining codebases, and helping with multi-step coding tasks without losing the plot halfway through. And on top of that, there’s Perplexity, which can research, write, and even help generate code while pulling in up-to-date information from the web, almost like a general-purpose digital worker that doesn’t sleep.
I’ve heard good things about Google’s Gemini as well, especially for coding and multimodal use cases, but I haven’t really dug into it yet. That’s kind of the point though I think. If you can think of a project now, there’s probably an AI model out there that can help you get from idea to rough working prototype way faster than if you were trying to do everything by hand.
Rebuilding the Website and Letting AI Help Shape Ideas
One of the most satisfying things I’ve done during this “quiet” phase is upgrade my website. Not just tweaking colors or changing a font, but actually adding new sections, new pages, and new ideas that I’m excited about.
With tools like Codex acting as an AI coding partner, you can go from “I wish my site could do this” to “Okay, let’s build it” in a weekend instead of a month. You can ask it to scaffold parts of the backend, suggest API integration patterns, or help debug that one annoying function you keep breaking. Then you have Perplexity, which can help with researching frameworks, generating boilerplate code, and even writing documentation or explanations for what you just built.
For me, this turned my website from just a place to park articles into more of a playground. A hub. Something I can keep evolving as I learn. And because AI is good at the boring scaffolding and error-hunting parts, I’m free to think more about the experience I want visitors to have, not just how to wire up the fifth form submission endpoint.
That’s the underrated advantage of these tools. They don’t just make you faster, they make you more willing to try things you would have talked yourself out of before.
The New Project
Right now, one of the ideas I’m working on is a new website that lets people convert images and videos. Nothing earth-shattering in theory, but it’s exactly the kind of project that would have felt like a huge technical mountain a few years ago. I am also working on upgrading a couple websites I have built over the past couple of weeks. This converter though is one of the hardest websites I have built so far.
Now, I can break it down into pieces. Front end, back end, file handling, conversion logic, maybe some AI-based enhancements down the line. I can lean on coding assistants like Codex or Claude when I get stuck structuring the app or handling edge cases, and I can use Perplexity when I need to research best practices, libraries, or performance tips.
And yeah, I still have those moments where I’m staring at the screen thinking, “Who am I to build this?” But every time I push through that and get one more piece working, it reinforces a bigger lesson I think. You don’t have to be “ready” to build something. You just have to be willing to start messy and improve as you go, with a little help from the robots.
Time, Momentum, and the Push to Keep Going
Underneath all the tools and projects, there’s this quieter theme running through everything I’m doing, time. How do you keep showing up year after year when you don’t have some overnight success story to point to? How do you keep recording videos when you’re nervous on camera? How do you keep writing when a lot of people will scroll right past it?
The answer, at least for me, has become pretty simple. You keep going because you’re not just building content, you’re building yourself. Every article sharpens how you think. Every video helps you communicate a little better. Every late-night coding session where you finally get something working rewires your brain just enough that the next problem doesn’t feel as big.
AI doesn’t replace that grind. It doesn’t replace the part of you that has to care enough to show up. What it does is make the path a little less brutal. It shortens the distance between idea and execution. It lets you test more experiments, launch more tiny projects, ship more weird ideas. And over time, that adds up.
Some people will find your work in year one. Some will find you in year ten. A lot of them won’t see the awkward starts, the breaks you had to take, or the pivots into things like vibe coding and AI-assisted building. But that’s okay. You’ll know. You’ll remember how many times you could have stopped but didn’t.
If you’re reading this and you’re somewhere in that messy middle. Nervous on camera, unsure who’s really watching, learning new tools while feeling behind, you’re not alone. The internet moves fast, but growth still moves slow. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and keep making the things only you can make.
At some point, the right people find you. But only if you’re still here when they show up.
Thanks for reading everyone! Visit my site to learn more about me and explore what I’m building at Learn With Hatty. Remember, stay curious and keep learning.
Original article on BULB
