In 2024 I guess, I made an extension without really knowing what is programming, or what is the concept of software, it was in Arabic. I even didn’t know that Vibe coding would exist a year after!
ChatGPT told me to do this and that, Claude sonnet helped me, mistral too. I tried my best to achieve a native RTL support for my extension, not knowing I could do it with a simple CSS code in any extension that supports this method from Chrome market store.
It was fun experiment, that should have ended with me getting into software engineering, and bidding farewell to civil engineering for good. but no, I only wanted this specific extension for my personal use, didn’t’ have any extra ambition to develop it more than that, I also had my doubts about the whole concept of being a software engineer, for some reason I didn’t believe it was solid enough for me, In 2019 I believed the rule was going to change drastically, why? I remember it vaguely, because of A.I might take my role. I had to choose between architecture and civil department and completely Ignore the communication engineering because I didn’t believe I could work with it in Egypt, not knowing what the future have in mind
Rise of the Customization
This extension was my first experience with the customization world the A.I has opened for me, After that, when I had a free subscription because of my academic account, I managed to build and expand this Reader Mode extension of mine Omni Reader, it had a glimpse of Pocket, with a beautiful name and design.
I loved pocket with its unique design and recommendations, But Mozilla killed my dear friend with cold blooded hurt, poor pocket, farewell my friend. Why not build my own? it is low effort project with huge tolerance or mistakes.. it serves my needs in the most efficient way!
What a beauty! it fully supports Arabic, I can give my orders to the agent, and it simply will obey. Of course, with many mistakes, but it will eventually reach my goal. My best moment as a non-technical user when I connected Omni Reader to supabase and managed to sign in and save my data to the cloud, my second-best moment was when I finally managed to build a web app that worked smoothly in my shitty android mobile phone from xiaomi
Not as smooth and perfect as my extension, but at least it does the job, which is reading.. I made both of them open source, in case anyone wants to take them a step ahead, but I guess they might build their own version, or just ask ChatGPT to summarize the article!
A practical Customization
After I finished my military’s year of mandatory service, it was tough year in my life, after it passed, I was like a newborn baby, naked of any practical and marketable knowledge, and my degree requires memorization, and base foundation of many concepts and software tools, like AutoCad and CSI tools, like Etabs.. Revit, IdeaStatica. One of the courses I bought for 20$ or 1000 EGP at the time, was 480 hours, that would need much longer time than my entire year in college, that was one field in the civil engineering, reinforced concrete design!
The length is justified, but not for a junior level engineer, and it is hard to get into design at first, you may work as site engineer or technical office.. I don’t know the details, as I didn’t land a job in this field..
Info
If I hadn’t enrolled in a master’s program alongside my military service, I would’ve gone insane
My most serious try was in Steel design, as a friend of mine has a cousin owned an engineering consultancy specializing in structural steel design. I didn’t manage to work with them, they never asked for my services.. and that friend didn’t even call me after that, He was a good man, but not a good friend, not to me at least.
I wanted to wait until I finish my last term in my higher education coursework before applying to a job
After several months on unemployment, I -somehow- managed to get a job in a startup, run by a good person, it wasn’t smooth sailing at first, we had conflict over the unjustified delay.
In my new job, huge part was writing reports about the product we make, and fix them, our goal right now, is to launch our first product, MVP. What I used to make at first, is using a simple markdown file, and give it the ai agent, to solve them.. but, that wasn’t the best to do.
So, why not use A.I to Customize my experience, I build my reports system
It has a good editor with excel-like tables, and I can easily collect and categorize the problems using it. Its best use in making these reports has been extracting measurable metrics from them. rather than blind editing or random writing, give it a try!
The skill of clear writing is more valuable than some people think, Most of the times, writing = thinking.
The programming dream is much bigger and more serious than ever
My boss prepared a technical route to me, that I am working on it, I enrolled in a Business analysis course but withdrew from it after, It wasn’t one of my priorities, though, it was a good course.
Even though I don’t need solid technical skills in my current role, I should build the base to work comfortably with AI in production, not just have a superficial or incomplete understanding of it. I started reading Product management books too. Like Inspired
My master’s degree is in applied mathematics, and I have goals regarding computational mechanics, it would pure madness not to learn the deep concepts of programming. When I showed this photo to my brother who works in A.I production,
He burst out laughing. “Numpy isn’t easy, mate!” he said. I can’t keep relying on AI like this. As William Thurston said:
The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves
There is no virtue in letting A.I do what you should have done, with your own hand.. I don’t like the devilish waiting when the model does and you just keep looking to the damn screen.
And this does not conflict with using AI for productivity, or anything of the sort. Perhaps it should be temporary, or perhaps it is simply an inevitable reality. But the virtue of genuine understanding can only be cultivated through actual scientific practice.
I only used A.I to generate a thumbnail for this article, please leave a comment so I know you got something out of it, or just say hello.