I Still Don't Understand What's Happening. And I'm Building Things Anyway.

Let me start with a confession.

I do not understand what is going on under the hood. I want to be completely honest about that from the very first line, because I think it matters. When something I build actually works, I often have no real idea why. There is code on my screen that I could not have written, doing things I could not fully explain, and somehow it does exactly what I asked.

And here is the strange, wonderful part: I’m building things anyway and I do love the feeling of seeing an idea I had in front of me.

For most of my career I assumed that was impossible. I assumed you had to understand the machine to make the machine do anything. That belief kept me on one side of a line for twenty years. On the other side were the developers and engineers, people I have enormous respect for, people who do something genuinely hard and genuinely deep. I want to be clear about that, because what I’m describing is not “look, anyone can do what engineers do.” That’s not true, and it would be insulting to suggest it. What real engineers do is craft, and it takes years to get good at it.

What changed for me is something different. I haven’t crossed the line into their world. I’ve found that I can now stand at the edge of it, describe what I want in plain human language, and watch something take shape, without ever needing to fully understand how.

It started with small things

It didn’t begin with a grand decision to “learn to code.” It began with curiosity, and a little bit of not being afraid to look stupid.

I wanted our website to do something it didn’t do. In the past, that meant writing a ticket, asking Benji, and waiting. Benji is my co-founder and the technical heart of LetPeopleWork. He’s a brilliant engineer, and the gap between what he understands and what I understand is enormous and very real. But he also has a tool to build, and I felt bad adding “make Peter’s small website idea happen” to his list every single time.

So one evening, I just tried. Actually, that’s not quite true. The honest version is that Benji pushed me to try.

I had been circling the idea for a while, too nervous to actually touch anything. My constant worry was that I would break something. Our website, the real one, the one people actually visit. So I kept asking him, again and again, “Am I allowed to push this change? Are you sure? What if I break it?” And every single time, Benji gave me the same calm answer: “Don’t worry. We can always revert.”

We can always revert. Four words that did more for my confidence than any tutorial ever could.

Because that’s the thing I didn’t understand back then. I thought building was fragile, that one wrong move would bring everything crashing down. Benji knew it wasn’t like that. He knew there was a safety net under me the whole time, and he kept gently reminding me it was there until I finally believed him enough to jump.

So I described what I wanted, in plain words, the way I would explain it to a colleague. And something built it. I tweaked it, I broke it, I reverted it, I fixed it, I asked questions when I got stuck. Did I understand the code that appeared? Honestly, no. Not really. But at the end of the evening, the thing existed. The thing I wanted. And I had been the one to bring it into being, even if I couldn’t have explained a single line of it.

That feeling is hard to describe. It’s not the feeling of becoming an engineer. It’s the feeling of suddenly being allowed into a room I always thought was locked, even though I still can’t read the writing on the walls.

And then it didn’t stop

Once I’d built one thing, I couldn’t stop seeing things to build. And this is the part I find genuinely thrilling, because it has almost nothing to do with technical skill and everything to do with imagination.

I made my own web apps. Little tools that solve problems only I have. I built an Oura workout generator, because I wanted my training to adapt to how I’d actually slept and recovered, and no existing app did exactly what I wanted. So I made one that did. Do I know how it works? Not really. Does it work? Yes.

I built my own football manager game and a Football wordle kind of game. Not because the world needs another one, but because I had the idea and wondered “what if?” Turns out the distance between “what if?” and “it exists” has become astonishingly short.

And then there’s obAIa, the system Benji and I use to run the business side of LetPeopleWork. This is where it gets really fun, because this isn’t me building alone in a corner. This is the two of us, sitting together, just talking to it like a colleague.

That’s the shift that genuinely excites me. The bottleneck used to be capability. Now the bottleneck is imagination. The question is no longer “can this be built?” The question is “what do I even want to build?” And that’s a far more interesting question to wake up to.

The point isn’t getting it right

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. I get a lot of it wrong. I build things that don’t work, that I throw away, that go in completely the wrong direction. I still don’t understand most of what’s happening when it does work.

And it doesn’t matter.

Because this isn’t about precision or mastery or doing it the “correct” way. An engineer cares about doing it right, and they should, because they’re building things other people depend on. What I’m doing is something else entirely. I’m exploring. I’m playing. I’m chasing “wouldn’t it be cool if...” down a hundred different paths and seeing which ones lead somewhere.

Most of those paths lead nowhere. That’s fine. The joy, and the value, is in the small percentage that lead somewhere I never could have reached before. The workout tool I actually use. The little website improvement that actually helps. The business system that actually makes Benji and me sharper.

I’m not optimising. I’m imagining out loud and seeing what sticks. And it turns out that when the cost of trying an idea drops to almost nothing, you start having a lot more ideas worth trying.

Here’s what I’ve realised

The barrier to building used to be deep technical knowledge. You had to understand the machine. That’s a real barrier, and it kept a lot of curious people, including me, firmly outside.

That particular barrier has changed shape. I still don’t understand the machine. But I no longer have to, in order to make something with it. What I need instead is the willingness to describe what I want clearly, the curiosity to keep poking when something breaks, and the imagination to dream up what might be possible in the first place and then slice it into small batches. Interestingly enough, these concepts still hold.

None of those are technical skills. They’re human ones. And I had them the whole time. I just never thought they counted for this.

To be absolutely clear: this does not make me an engineer, and it does not replace one. The people who build the serious, robust, dependable things are as essential as they ever were, maybe more so. Benji is still the one building Lighthouse, and thank goodness, because what he does is real craft that I deeply respect and do not pretend to share. What’s changed isn’t that the experts matter less. It’s that the rest of us are suddenly allowed to play in the workshop too.

Well. Allowed to play in most of the workshop. Benji happily lets me loose on the website. He lets me build my little apps. He’ll talk to obAIa with me for hours. But Lighthouse, our actual product, the one customers genuinely depend on? Let’s just say there is a polite but very firm distance between me and that codebase. I’ve learned to stop asking. We both know it’s for the best, and I’ve made my peace with admiring that one from a safe distance. (Even though yesterday Benji gently pushed me to open a Pull Request for a UI bug I found. What a feeling when Benji merged it!)

This isn’t really a story about AI

I know it sounds like one. And yes, the tools are what made this possible. But the tools aren’t the point.

The point is the shift in what I let myself imagine. For twenty years, my ideas had a filter sitting in front of them. Every “wouldn’t it be cool if...” was immediately followed by “...but I can’t build that, so never mind.” That filter is gone now. The ideas get to come out and breathe. Some of them turn into something. Most don’t. All of them are more fun to have than to swallow.

If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking “I’m not technical enough” or “that’s not my lane,” I want you to notice what that thought actually does. It doesn’t protect you. It just quietly kills the idea before you ever get to find out where it might have led.

You don’t have to understand how it works. I certainly don’t. You don’t have to do it the right way. You just have to be curious enough to describe what you want and brave enough to be a beginner out loud.

So, imagine, then try

Pick the thing you wish existed. The tool, the tweak, the silly app for your weird hobby. Don’t research it for three weeks. Don’t sign up for a course. Just describe what you want, in your own words, and start.

You’ll get most of it wrong. You won’t understand half of what happens. You’ll feel out of your depth constantly. None of that is a sign you’re not technical. It’s just what it feels like to explore somewhere new.

And every now and then, out of all that fumbling, something real will appear. Something you imagined, now sitting in front of you, working. There are few feelings quite like it.

The room was never as locked as you thought. You don’t need to read every word on the walls to walk in and start making things.

Let’s try.

P.S. I still think about those four words Benji kept saying. “We can always revert.” I’ve realised they’re not really about code. They’re about permission. Permission to try, to be clumsy, to get it wrong, to learn out loud, all with a safety net underneath. Most of us never build anything, not because we lack the tools, but because nobody ever told us we were allowed to break things and undo them. So consider this your version of that sentence. Go on, try the thing. You can always revert.