How I learned to stop worrying about what I didn't know and love the terminal

It's a Saturday morning, and I'm working on the app I built last weekend. An idea I had after watching a documentary on gut health, and being like hey I need an idea for an app that can help me practice building a database and a backend. Within a few hours from having that thought the app was live, and this week I even onboarded a few friends, took their feedback, and shipped some updates. This weekend I was working on a new feature set to earn badges and make challenges with your friends. I'm having an absolute blast.

And to think that less than a year ago I was afraid of the terminal is insane.

I'll be honest, I was pissed off by coding agents at first. I was surrounded by engineers and wanna-be-engineers who were raving about them. The engineers of course got the value prop instantly and the wanna-be-engineers claimed they were making all this cool shit, and I felt left out. I was like I'm smart, but I just don't get it.

When you're starting from zero it's hard because you don't know what you don't know and there is no one telling you where to start. Sure I could put a prompt into claude and see it spit out a static page that is not hosted anywhere and be like great how do I make this an app?

I didn't know what hosting was, although hilariously my husband works at Vercel. I didn't know any of the underlying mechanisms and so sure I could prompt my way into a cool output, but so what.

A few things led up to my aha moment. First working as the only non tech person at an AI start up where anytime I built up the courage to ask a dumb question about something I felt like I should already know, the team would be like have you tried asking Claude — not the answer I wanted, but definitely what I needed to build my AI muscle.

Secondly, they showed me that code is literally files and instructions to read files. And the terminal is just a shortcut to all of that. They set up my whole environment, gave me access to the codebase, and wrote scripts for me to run to solve my problems.

It was still progress, because now I was using the terminal often and I was starting to warm up to it, but still didn't like the fact that you can't click your cursor to be anywhere you want it – you can only use arrows and backspace [eyeroll]

It really changed when one day I thought I was using Claude Code, because I was talking to Claude in the chat interface and it spat out code.

And then I asked my husband — "I just wrote something with Claude Code and I want it to be something I can share, how do I do that?"

He looked at my screen and said — "you're not using Claude Code."

A heated discussion followed about how I couldn't conceptualize what was going on in the terminal so I needed the touch and feel of chatting in the Claude app, even if that made later steps in the process harder. Eventually he convinced me to just try connecting Claude Code directly in the terminal — and I hate to say it, but he was right, and I am never going back.

And now just a few short months later, I am buying a domain, shipping an app from scratch, connecting it to a database and deploying it. It's live in production with users so now I'm shipping PRs and testing them before updating features. This is all lingo I never really understood, and in a matter of months, and now even day over day I'm learning new things and putting them right to use. I'm just so in awe of what is possible, and want to help others get over the hump, because I'm just so freakin excited to build cool shit.