AI: from Noob to Mastery (nearly)

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It's just past midnight, and I'm arguing with a machine about the number eight.

I want an eight of hearts. A playing card, eight red hearts on it, nothing else. The AI draws nine. I type: eight. It draws seven. I type: eight, one top left, one bottom right, and they're hearts, not stars. It draws Christmas stars. I type: HEARTS. EIGHT. It delivers Halloween pumpkins.

This went on for days. And it was hilarious and maddening at the same time — usually both in the very same moment.

How a toy turned into a tool

It all started in May 2023, completely harmless. A YouTube video, a colleague saying „give this a try." No plan, no intention. A new toy had come out, and I wanted to play around with it.

The playing around turned into something else. Three years later my data export draws a sober conclusion: 1,553 conversations, 20,618 messages, 16.8 million characters. Printed out, that's roughly eleven thousand A4 pages. Nobody types eleven thousand pages by accident.

Today I build entire apps with this machine. But the road there ran, as so often, straight through the nonsense.

Why you can't spot the AI as a beginner

At the start it was simple: chat in a browser. Question in, answer out, amazement. Sometimes the answer was brilliant, sometimes flatly made up — and as a noob you can't hear the difference.

That's exactly what's fascinating about AI and, at the same time, what's treacherous: it always sounds confident. Whether it's right or hallucinating isn't written on its face. Learning to tell the two apart takes time.

Honestly, I could have programmed a lot of it myself. Partly, at least. But letting the machine do it was too fascinating — and faster on top of that. Images, though, I could never have made myself. Ironically, those were exactly my Waterloo.

The code worked. The card didn't.

Because the Solitaire game this was all about — the AI actually built it for me. A complete card game in Swift, late 2024, up and running. No problem.

The problem was the cards themselves — the images. I wanted the AI to draw the playing cards, and it failed so spectacularly that I still can't quite believe it.

One single one of these sessions runs to 134 messages and 34 image attempts. Thirty-four tries for a picture that's supposed to have eight symbols on it. I started out like a polite human being and ended up like someone explaining to a toddler for the twentieth time why the stove is hot.

April 2025 is by far my most active month ever: 3,460 messages. The runner-up month doesn't even reach 700. Almost that entire record consists of me trying to teach an artificial intelligence to count to eight.

And this is where it tips from funny to profound: the same AI that had programmed a complete Solitaire game for me failed at an eight of hearts. Code — world class. Eight symbols placed neatly on an image — impossible. That's what this technology is like: in a single breath genius and shockingly stupid, with often just one prompt in between.

From chat partner to lackey

At some point the whole thing moved out of the browser. First into the command line, then into tools that no longer just answer but pitch in on their own: read files, write code, run programs, find and fix their own mistakes.

That changes the relationship. I'm no longer debating with a chatbot, I'm delegating to an agent. I say what I want, and the machine builds it — over many steps, largely on its own, while I sit next to it and marvel.

How deeply this got its hooks into me is given away by the clock. My most active hour is 9 p.m. Between one and five in the morning it's radio silence — mostly. Every now and then there's a message at midnight, because something just had to get finished. See above, eight of hearts.

(nearly)

So am I a master by now? Not quite — hence the „nearly." There's still a stretch to go, but it won't take much longer.

And the AI itself? It's not quite a master either. In the endless debates, somehow everyone is right: at some things it's still bad, at others long since brilliant. Only one thing is certain to me — the next few years are going to be seriously interesting.

From noob to mastery, on both sides of the screen. Nearly.

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