I had a very simple plan.
Open AI.
Describe my website.
Watch it build everything.
Download the files.
Upload them to my hosting.
Go make coffee.
That was the plan.
AI had other plans.
A few days later people were asking me questions I wasn't prepared for.
"Have you pushed it to GitHub?"
"To where?"
"Have you connected Supabase?"
"Super... what?"
"Did you configure your environment variables?"
I honestly thought environment variables had something to do with Eskom and the weather.
Everyone else laughed.
I laughed too.
Mostly because I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
AI didn't make technology disappear
Like many people, I believed artificial intelligence would remove the difficult parts.
I thought websites had become simple.
Describe what you want.
Click a button.
You're done.
Reality was very different.
AI could generate beautiful code.
But someone still had to understand where that code lived, how it was deployed, how databases connected to it, how domains worked, and what happened when something broke.
That someone turned out to be me.
The homework nobody mentions
Every time I solved one problem, AI quietly introduced another subject.
GitHub.
Repositories.
Deployments.
Netlify.
Supabase.
APIs.
Environment Variables.
Version Control.
None of these were on my original to-do list.
But somehow they all became part of building "one simple website."
The funny thing is...
If someone had explained all of this to me before I started, I probably would have said:
"Forget it. I'll just pay someone."
I'm glad nobody did.
Because every frustrating afternoon taught me something I now use almost every day.
The website wasn't the biggest thing I built.
The knowledge was.
AI changed the curriculum
I used to think learning technology meant learning programming languages.
Today I see it differently.
AI hasn't removed learning.
It has changed what we need to learn.
Less time memorising code.
More time understanding systems.
Less typing.
More thinking.
Less repeating.
More asking better questions.
Looking back...
I'm actually grateful that AI gave me homework.
Not because I enjoyed every lesson.
Far from it.
But because every lesson made the next project a little less intimidating.
Today, when someone mentions GitHub or deployment, I don't panic.
I remember the day those words sounded like another language.
That's progress.
Final thoughts
Maybe that's the biggest misunderstanding about artificial intelligence.
People think it's replacing learning.
In my experience, it isn't.
It's introducing us to subjects we never knew we needed.
And perhaps that's the real gift.
AI didn't give me fewer things to learn.
It simply gave me better reasons to learn them.
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Creative Strategist at Chesly.Tech.
