When I came back from military service and returned to university, I stood in front of the double-major application for a long time. What I wanted to write down was computer science. In the end I never wrote it.

There wasn't a single reason. Money was tight at home, so I would have to find work the moment I graduated. I wanted to go on to graduate school in philosophy, but that was a more distant thing still. And above all, I was afraid: would a philosophy major with computer science stapled on actually get hired? Woven into that was the same old fear — that I would step onto that road and never learn to understand its language.

So I chose economics, which looked like the safest option. I couldn't keep up with that either, and I graduated after downgrading it from a double major to a minor.

I write this twenty years later because only now do I see that I gave up more than one thing back then. I gave up computer science, I gave up graduate school, and I gave up half of even the compromise I had settled for.

So I studied philosophy, and I made a career out of working with numbers — the world of accounting, budgets, and reports. It wasn't bad. Actually, it suited me well. I've done that work for over a decade and still do. But every so often, watching developers conjure something onto a screen with their own hands, a corner of my heart would quietly ache. That, I'd think, is the landscape of the road I didn't take.

An Old Thrill, Returned in My Forties

Since last year, I've been building things with an AI assistant. I was skeptical at first. I can't write a single line of code — what exactly was I going to build? Then something strange happened. I would say, in plain language, "I wish something like this existed," and a few minutes later, there it was on my screen. It was clumsy. Buttons hid where no one could see them, the keyboard covered the input field, something was always slightly off. But it was what I had said. Something that had existed only in my head was now out in the world.

Take this past weekend. On Saturday, I added tabs to the browser app on my phone — each tab carrying its own separate AI conversation, so the left tab could research flights while the right tab cleaned up code. On Sunday morning, I migrated 1,300 notes I'd accumulated over seven years — and stopped opening — into my AI's memory. Now when I ask, "What was that thing I wrote up years ago?", it finds the note and answers. And on Sunday evening, an idea I'd had that morning — a messenger where my AI helpers appear like coworkers in one window — became a running web app before midnight.

That's two days of one weekend. If I showed this paragraph to the man standing in front of that application form, he wouldn't believe it.

On Clumsiness

Let's be clear: the things I build are clumsy. Next to a commercial product, they're embarrassing. The sidebar shipped stuck open, covering the whole screen. A button was so subtle you couldn't tell it was a button. Every time I find something like this, I tell my AI assistant: "Fix this." And it gets fixed. The next day another rough edge surfaces, and that gets fixed too.

At first the clumsiness embarrassed me. I think differently now. Clumsiness isn't the defect of this way of building — it's the privilege. Instead of waiting for something to be finished, I use it clumsy today and fix it with a sentence tomorrow. At work, changing one system takes months of approvals, quotes, and scheduling. My clumsy little tools? An annoyance discovered in the evening is gone by the next morning. The polish is low, but the speed of evolution beats any organization I've ever known.

And I realized one more thing. The thrill was never about polish. It comes from "the thing that was in my head is now on my screen." That feeling isn't diminished one bit by rough edges.

What Courage Actually Was

Lately I've been thinking about what, exactly, I was afraid of back then. It wasn't programming itself. It was the language of that world — compiler errors, semicolons, inscrutable acronyms — and the prospect of facing it alone, without an interpreter. Getting stuck for hours with no one to ask. I think it was that isolation that frightened me.

Now I have an interpreter. I still can't read a compiler error. It doesn't matter. My job isn't typing code — it's making decisions. What to build, why to build it, where to stop, which rough edges to tolerate and which to fix. The muscles I built over a decade of corporate planning and numbers turn out to be exactly the muscles this work needs. The road I turned away from, it turns out, was a road I'd already been half-walking. AI just filled in the other half.

Written this way, it sounds like the regret has been settled. Not entirely. I still sometimes imagine what would have happened if I'd taken that road then. But the imagining no longer stings. I arrived twenty years late — but I arrived, and the view is better than anything I used to picture.

To Anyone Standing Where I Stood

If you're reading this and you have your own memory of turning away from some road for lack of courage — whether it was coding, writing, or music — the tools that translate that world's language now genuinely exist. Your start will be clumsy. Certainly clumsy. But the feeling of watching your own clumsy creation actually run, for the first time, is exactly as good as you imagined back then.

My weekends at forty-three are more thrilling than they were back then. I truly never expected to write that sentence.