Codes Over Coffee

Take a guess, what could Codes Over Coffee possibly mean?

Did I go on a coding date? Did I spend an entire weekend sitting in some cafe coding all day? Honestly it also sounds like the name of a podcast where two people sit with microphones and yap about startups.

Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with any of that.

For the past few weeks coding has pretty much been the only thing I have been doing most of the time, and since this is supposed to be a weekly blog I guess I have to take you through this coding journey that has somehow just started.

I know saying “coding journey” makes it sound like I have already had this very long coding career.

I don’t.

A month ago I could not code at all.

Like genuinely.

I barely knew anything about coding.

I still remember my first proper encounter with CSS. Damn, I was nervous. I don’t think I have ever been that nervous around a girl or even on a date.

Where do I even begin with this?

It feels like yesterday when we had our first class and started understanding what we were going to be doing over the next few weeks. I have this really bad habit of trying to register every single piece of information that is being told to me, so during those first lectures I was basically absorbing everything my professor said like a sponge.

Which sounds like a good thing until your brain actually has to process all of it.

And boy there was a lot to process.

Initially everything felt fast. There were so many things being introduced and I was just sitting there trying to remember all of them at once.

I remember playing CSS Diner and boy oh boy.

I felt slow.

Painfully slow.

I knew I needed time to figure things out, so I decided pretty early that I would have to put in extra hours after class if I actually wanted to catch up.

And I guess that is where the title comes from.

Why Codes Over Coffee?

Because I chose code over break time, code over sleep and technically code over coffee too because I don’t even drink coffee.

The point is I am sleep deprived.

Very sleep deprived.

I am actually sleepy while typing this blog, so there is a very good chance that half of what I am saying will stop making sense at some point.

But hey, that is part of the journey right?

A sleep deprived guy in his early twenties coding on weekends like a zombie.

A zombie who is also so lazy that he barely commits his files and then loses half of his data.

Yup.

That is me.

So how did I even get here?

For starters I just started spending more and more time with my laptop. I would sit there for hours basically break dancing on my keyboard while watching a bunch of random white guys on YouTube yap about coding, productivity and how they retired at the age of thirty.

Then the assignments started.

And that is when the real fun began.

I would get stuck constantly. Sometimes I knew exactly what I wanted to make but had absolutely no clue how to make it. Sometimes I did not even know what exactly I was confused about.

And the terminal used to dance in front of my eyes.

I would stare at it for so long that at some point I genuinely felt like I was entering some kind of trance.

Eventually I realised I did not have enough time to keep watching YouTube tutorials every single time something went wrong.

So I knew what I had to do.

I had to switch to LLMs.

Yes.

Me and my laptop already have trust issues.

I don’t commit my files often enough either, which now makes me think maybe I have commitment issues too.

Anyway.

I switched to LLMs and I hate admitting this but yes, it helped.

Not in the sense that suddenly I knew everything. In fact it was the opposite. The more assignments I did, the more I realised how many things I did not know.

But I started learning while actually making things.

Something would break, I would try to understand why it broke, fix it, accidentally break something else and then somehow learn something from that too.

At first I did not even properly understand how nesting worked. Slowly and slowly I started getting a grip on it.

By the end of the first week I finally had some clarity.

By the second week I still would not say I knew how to code properly, but at least I knew what I wanted to make and I had started understanding what I needed in order to make it.

And honestly that already felt like a huge difference.

Then came another nightmare.

My first vibe coding experience.

We were supposed to build clocks.

The task sounded simple. Design your clock in Figma, Illustrator or whatever software you wanted, and then use an LLM to help you execute it.

Basically vibe coding.

But the important part was that AI was not supposed to take creative decisions for you.

You had to know what you wanted.

That sounded very easy until I actually had to explain what I wanted to an AI.

I was terrible at it.

When everything was in my own hands I was doing fine. I knew how I wanted the thing to look. I could see it in my head.

Then I would explain it to the AI, press enter, wait for the result and just sit there wondering how we had gone from what I asked for to whatever the hell was now on my screen.

My first vibe coding date with GPT and Claude was not very good.

Maybe the problem was that I was seeing both of them at the same time.

I guess I was cheating and I paid the price.

Eventually I dumped both of them for GitHub Copilot.

She dumped me too when I ran out of credits.

I even got rejected while trying to get the Student Developer Pack.

So yaa, things were not going very well romantically either.

But don’t worry, it does not get any sadder.

At least I hope it doesn’t.

Somewhere in between all of this I started realising that talking to an LLM is a skill of its own.

You need patience.

You need to know what you want.

You need to know how you want it.

And most importantly you need to somehow explain the picture inside your head to something that cannot actually see the picture inside your head.

Which is much harder than it sounds.

This might sound crazy but sometimes it genuinely feels a little like being a movie director hehe.

You have this vision in your head and now you have to somehow communicate it properly enough that somebody else can execute it.

Except in this case that somebody else is an AI that can randomly forget what you told it three messages ago.

As we started getting closer to the final project my excitement levels went through the roof and slowly I started turning into an actual zombie.

A zombie who could probably race Sonic or Flash on a keyboard.

And then I discovered another problem.

My own brain.

I would be working on the CSS for the Astrology page and suddenly think, wait, what if I build the Library page right now?

So obviously I would stop what I was doing and start building that.

Then halfway through the Library page I would remember something about Astrology.

Then I would go back.

Then I would remember something about the homepage.

Then something would break.

Then I would forget what I was originally doing.

Trust me, this is not a healthy practice if you are in a relationship with an AI.

It creates confusion, misunderstandings, frustration and possibly even a breakup.

Luckily that has not happened yet.

I still have around forty eight hours though, so there is still time.

If I look back at everything now, it is actually kind of crazy.

I went from being scared of CSS and completely confused by the terminal to now spending my weekends building this website like some sleep deprived creature that survives entirely on ideas and a destroyed sleep schedule.

I still get confused.

Things still break.

Sometimes something starts working and I genuinely have no idea why it started working.

But I understand way more than I did a few weeks ago.

And honestly I think the biggest problem now is that I am enjoying it too much.

Three days ago, for example, I randomly decided to add a birth chart generator to my website.

Did I already have enough things to finish?

Yes.

Did I need another feature?

Absolutely not.

Did any of that stop me?

Obviously not.

That night I genuinely felt like a fourth year BTech hostel student who had crashed a wedding for free food.

I knew I probably had other things I was supposed to be doing.

I knew I probably should not even be there.

But I had already made it inside, so why leave now?

Anyway I think I should stop here because I can already feel myself about to puke another thousand words about CSS, broken terminals, AI relationships and my terrible sleep schedule.

I should probably sleep.

Or commit my files.

Actually yaa.

I should probably commit my files first.