← Adam Garceau

You don't need to code. You need the right order.

On the prompt-and-pray loop, and what actually fixes it.

For a couple years I built things the dumb way. I'd open up an AI, paste in a giant wall of text describing what I wanted, hit enter, and hope. Then I'd fix it. Then fix it again. And again. It worked eventually. It also took forever, and half the time I ended up with something nobody wanted.

Here's what I finally figured out. The problem was never that I can't code. The problem was I didn't know the right order. I didn't know what an AI could actually do for me before the building part.

Because there's a whole set of moves that come before "build it," and almost nobody uses them. An AI can do the research first. It can go read what real customers are actually saying about a problem, in their own words. It can build a survey audience out of that research and tell you whether your idea is any good before you write a single line. It can pick the angle. It can test the words. And it can tell you, honestly, when you're about to build the wrong thing.

That last one matters more than anything. Most tools are built to say yes to you. The useful move is a tool that will look at your idea and say "don't build this, here's why." That one sentence saves you a month.

So I stopped dumping a wall of text and hoping. I put the steps in order. Ask the right questions. Do the research. Ask the fake customers. Then build. Then test it on real people. The thrash disappeared, because the thing that caused the thrash, building blind, was gone.

You don't need to become an engineer. You need to know the order of operations and what the machine can carry for you. That's the whole trick. I packaged the exact order I use into an open-source thing called Forge. It's free. Go take it apart.

I'm a marketing director who builds his own tools. More at adamgarceau.com.