What you’ll get from this lesson: Drop the “I can’t code” barrier and learn what you actually need: direction, logic, and review.
Prerequisites: No software installation required. Think of one task you want AI to finish for you.
When I used to teach, the two questions I got most often were: “Do I need to know how to code?” and “Do I need to know English?”
Let me start with myself. I didn’t study computer science. I used to understand a little HTML, and now I hardly even look at it, because I hand all the code to AI. As for English, I failed college English every time. If you’ve watched my livestreams, you know there are words I’m not even sure how to pronounce.
Did either of these get in the way of using AI in my business? No. My website, my copywriting, and my payment integration were all built by AI after I explained clearly what I needed. The AI Agent I built myself was made the same way, one step at a time.
For Now, Don’t Treat Coding and English as Barriers
If you’re already interested in coding or English, going back to learn them is a great idea. But if your goal is to get AI to do things for you, I’d suggest putting your energy first into the areas where you want to get stronger. These two matter less than you might think.
Whether you can code and whether you can get started are two different questions. When people really get stuck, the most common reason is not that they can’t code. It’s that they can’t say clearly what they want.
What You Need to Learn Is Giving Instructions Like a Boss
Using AI now feels a lot like being a boss. Many bosses can’t code, and an e-commerce owner doesn’t need to know how a website is written, but that doesn’t stop them from being a boss. What they need to know is the direction, what the result should be, and how to help their staff make the most of their strengths.
Working with AI is the same. I put my focus on learning logic and structure: how many steps the task has, where the data comes from, and what the finished result should look like. How parameters are named and how the code is written, I leave to AI. It only needs to know that.
You Don’t Have to Know More Than AI, but You Do Have to Be Clearer About the Direction
AI already knows more than we do about many subjects, and it will only get smarter. You don’t need to beat it on how much it knows, but only you know the direction, because what you’re making is your own thing. AI can’t read minds. It doesn’t know which version you really want.
So as you work, you’ll naturally practice three things: how to state what you need clearly, how to ask AI to make changes, and how to check whether what it made is right. These abilities are worth more of your time than memorizing syntax.
Today, Start by Making One Thing Clear
Take the one thing you want AI to help with and write it down in three sentences:
- What do I want to get done?
- What materials do I have that I can give it?
- When it’s finished, what do I need to see for it to count as a success?
If you can’t write the third sentence, don’t rush to look for tools yet. Once you can state these three clearly, you already have the foundation for starting your own Agent.
Check Before You Finish This Lesson
If you can say in your own words, “What I need to learn is direction, logic, and review, not learning to code first,” and you’ve written the three sentences above, you can mark this lesson as complete.
In the next article, I’ll talk about why many people watch a pile of tutorials and still can’t build anything, and how to get around those walls.
👉 Start L1-01: build your first Agent →
L1 is free after you sign in. Start with L1-01, follow it step by step, and you'll have an Agent of your own.
Not ready to start yet? That's fine. Scroll to the bottom and tap "Next lesson →" to keep reading the free articles, then come back to L1-01 when you're ready.