Relearning how to build

I was inspired by Gustavs Cirulis’ Build Like It’s 1996, where he compared today’s AI tools to the early days of 3D game making, with no rule books, just curiosity and experimentation.

That same spirit of fearless building took me back to my school library at 14, making fan sites on Angelfire, GeoCities, and Zoomshare, and customising Bebo and MySpace pages with HTML and CSS. Over time, I picked up HTML and CSS properly through books, experimented with Microsoft FrontPage, and moved on to BEM, SASS, NPM, MVC frameworks, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and eventually React.

Then I drifted away. In my day job, I focused more on design, and modern dev started to feel like a wall of errors, dependency issues, and red terminal text every time I tried coming back to build something. The spark faded.

I have been experimenting with Cursor for the past year. It feels like having a patient mentor on call, setting up projects, fixing issues, and explaining why and how so I learn as I go. Over the past year, I have built a directory website for finding remote-friendly cafes and restaurants in Dubai, a padel tracking app, a music playlist name generator, and a handful of other small experiments. Each one has taught me something new, and I am now exploring ideas for a full app in the future.

But one experiment in particular reminded me exactly why I love creating and bringing ideas to life: a Pokédex app built in SwiftUI using the PokeAPI, without writing a single line of SwiftUI code myself. I set up an initial Xcode project, described what I wanted, and Cursor generated the entire app, explained how it worked, and even suggested small UI tweaks.

It was fast, fun, and effortless.

For me, the spark is back, and building feels playful again. 🚀