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Can you code with AI agents without being technical at all?

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Today, we're going to go through if you actually could do that.

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This is an episode based on an article I read by Ben Tossel.

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He is just a master of communicating how non-technical people can use AI.

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And he wrote this incredible guide.

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It got 3.8 million views on X.

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And we're going to go through it together to basically take all those insights.

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He talks about what he's actually shipped as a non-technical person,

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how he actually works, what his setup is, how he codes on the go,

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and more, all the insights that he has.

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We're going to go through it together.

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I started reading this, frankly, and I was like,

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this is so, so much sauce that I need to go through it with everyone here together.

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Because I think that the people that stayed to the end of this episode

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are going to have an unfair advantage,

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because he just, he explains it so simply.

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So let's get right into it.

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He starts by saying,

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I've spent 3 billion tokens in four months.

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Every single one of them, through a terminal,

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watching an agent write code, I couldn't write myself.

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You may class me as a vibe coder,

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but I think the term overlooks any kind of skill involved in the work itself,

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much like no code did in circa 2019.

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He actually started a no-code company that was acquired by Xavier.

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I don't read the code, but I read the agent output religiously.

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And in doing so, I picked up a ton of knowledge around how code works,

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how projects works, where things fail, and where they succeed.

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So this is his guide to learning how to program.

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So he shipped a bunch of things.

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He shipped a personal site.

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He says, I revamped my personal site and made it look like a terminal CLI tool.

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He built a feed, so he built a simple social tracker for mentions of factory.

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That's the company he works at.

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Factory on Twitter, GitHub issues, post from the subreddit.

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It's open source.

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He built factory RAP, which was a first version of his RAP product,

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showed it to the team and they loved it,

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and they wanted to bake into the actual product themselves.

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So even if you don't want to actually build a startup,

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and you want to just get promoted at your job,

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learning how to actually use AI agents is helpful.

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Custom CLIs, I've created a few CLIs,

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like Python CLI, which then has been picked up by the team with customer support queries.

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He created a crypto tracker that predicts positive, negative,

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or neutral signals in dynamic data.

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He created droid myths, 12 days, 12 experiments,

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or games that touch the different themes.

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People are talking about on Twitter,

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memory context management, vibe coding, and things of that nature.

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He created an AI-directed video demo system.

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He gives it a prompt to create a video.

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It opens up ghosty, runs the command,

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and can open up other windows like a browser, recording the screen.

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Basically, acts as its own director, producer, and editor,

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and he even created a telegram bot powered by George exec.

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So he can have a local repo synced on a VPS,

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and about 50 other things I'm not mentioning here are left to die.

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So if you're interested in building things like this,

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this episode is for you.

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So let's see how he actually works.

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So he says he uses CLI exclusively.

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Terminal over web interfaces always.

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It's just more capable as a general agent,

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and I get to see it work.

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So a lot of people listening to this are non-technical,

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and they're probably using web versions of cloth.

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They're using web versions of lovable and products like that.

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This is your reminder kick,

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pat to actually go and use CLI,

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because if he can do it, you can do it too.

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This is what he does.

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He says if I have an idea for something,

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or there's an issue with something that I feel

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could be solved with code,

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basically everything these days,

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I'll spin up a new project Android, which is factory CLI.

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So I have no affiliation with factory at all.

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I've actually never used the product,

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but he's talking about this.

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So turn scripts into agent armies,

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Devex budget multiplier, failsafe permission.

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So probably worth playing with.

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I definitely, when I was reading this,

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I was like, I need to make a note to actually play with this.

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So you might want to do that too.

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I generally just talk to the model a couple times to start feeding in context about what I'm trying to do,

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and then I'll switch into spec mode and start getting a plan on what I want to build.

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In spec mode, I'll basically question a bunch of things,

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like I don't understand what this is,

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or why would we need that over this?

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Can't we do it this way?

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I thought this was like an interesting insight,

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which is approaching it as almost like a philosopher asking questions,

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so I made a mental note to do that.

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I'll link docs and get hub repos for the agent to explore.

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Then I let opus 4.5 with autonomy high, important here, just rip.

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I'll watch the stream, see what's happening,

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and when there are any errors,

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I may jump into the question or got it down a different path.

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I start the server, I test it, I give you back, and I iterate.

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So let's sort of TLDR it.

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So I kind of build ahead of myself first.

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I try and just build the thing.

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And then all the gaps and all the issues that I run into are the opportunities for me to learn.

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Is that a thing that is part of the system that I've seen across other repos

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that I should build up a sort of templated system handle?

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Should this go into an agents.md that actually follows me around

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and does the same thing on all other repos I'm going to be working on?

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So agent.md is a simple open format for guiding coding agents.

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So it's used by over 60,000 open source projects.

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You can think of agents.md as a readme for agents.

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A dedicated, predictable place to provide the context

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and instructions to help AI coding agents work on your projects.

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So you can see there's a little Y, like Y, you know, it should exist.

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But basically it's giving it a clear, predictable place for instruction.

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It keeps it concise, focused on human contributors, and

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there's some examples on the website here.

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So it's something that you might want to look into.

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So he talks about his agents.md setup.

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I've been spending more time trying to figure out the best agents.md setup for myself.

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Because this is effectively like an instruction manual.

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I've got repos, folders, locally.

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That's where all my coded projects go.

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In that repos folder is an agents.md that says to explicitly set up new repo

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with what to do and not to do.

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How to do things with GitHub, how to commit, all that kind of stuff,

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and whether it should use my work GitHub account or my personal.

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Running tests, end-to-end tests is one of the things I never really paid attention to previously.

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But now I'm really keen to have end-to-end tests on everything.

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Given my current knowledge and capability when I'm building things and testing them,

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there often might be silly things that I should have just caught or tested

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that had been tested in the first place.

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So as you're gaining confidence, running tests and end-to-end tests

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is something that you're going to want to do.

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And I often look at others agents.md files to see what I can borrow from my own.

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I'm constantly trying to improve my doc to make sure every session goes smoother.

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Coding on the Go section. So he says,

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I always make sure that I installed the droid GitHub app on every repo that I create.

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So when I'm deploying to GitHub,

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I make sure I'm submitting pull requests so I can have droid review it.

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And I can tag droid to make fixes itself with a custom prompt.

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Just insane that you can do this, by the way.

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It's literally like having a programmer.

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I can trigger it like a human programmer.

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I can trigger it from issues or from pull requests.

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It lets me code, this is mind-boggling.

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It lets me code for my phone and add new things when I'm out and about.

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That in combination with my telegram bot makes it really easy for me to do things when I'm

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on my desk. I just like picture him at a restaurant. He has twins.

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And he's just waiting for his meal to come or something like that.

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And he's just literally coding there.

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I also use Slack with my agent.

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I create a new channel for each repo and just fire off things as and when.

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I often spend up new channels for new ideas and Slack's a great one-person product with agent.

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This is a reminder that Slack is a great one-person product with agents

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and could be super helpful for you.

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So what has he been learning?

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Bash commands.

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So I hadn't heard about Bash commands in a very long time.

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I actually learned, I dropped out at computer science school.

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One of the first classes I took was Bash.

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So it was a throwback. It really clicked for me when I'd been running the change log

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process for a while. It's the same process over and over.

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I finally understood the workflow. So I got joy to create the slash command flow.

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And it's the first slash command that I actually have used properly,

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which runs a number of Bash commands and also prompts the model to do certain things,

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like reading through GitHub diffs, checking what is behind a feature flag,

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and what's not, and putting things into the right section of new features,

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bug fixes and that kind of thing.

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So what are Bash commands? By the way, Bash commands are basically a way for you to interact

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with the operating system. So there are things like CD, which means change directory.

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There's a bunch of commands that it's good to know a few of them because it's going to make

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your life a lot easier. From there, he says, I start getting more into Bash and CLIs.

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I've stopped using MCPs. I use the CLI version of most things over MCPs.

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Yes, because MCPs take up context, but mostly I feel like it's simpler.

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I usually only need a few of the tools in MCP would include.

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So with SuperBase, Versel, and GitHub, I'm always using the CLIs over the MCPs.

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This was actually news for me. I never thought about it like that,

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so I'm happy he talked about it. I often build my own CLI for things. For example,

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I built my own linear CLI so I can query my own issues and run everything from the terminal

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instead of going to the desktop or web interface. This is like a mindset shift.

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You're going, you know, doing everything from the terminal in this new world,

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this app native agent native world is super, it's more powerful right now.

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Okay, what else did he learn? He learned VPS. I abstractly knew what VPS was.

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It's like another computer that is on all time, then is on all the time somewhere else.

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But until I truly needed one, I didn't really know what I needed to do there.

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And there's still a lot to learn, but effectively now when I'm running the crypto tracker,

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I have a ton of data that's being pulled in every single minute and need that to stay always on.

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I can also use the VPS when using my droid telegram bot and use something called sync thing

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to sync my local repos to my VPS so that my repos are always up to date and they're in the same

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state as I left it. So it can just pick up on the go. So that's like the big unlock I think with,

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you know, a VPS. I think it stands for virtual, virtual to VPS, virtual private server.

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So that's the big unlock there. You know, the repos are always up to date and they're in the same

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state that I left. And lastly, skills. I've tried to use them a bit more. I've been using them not

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only just as knowledge, but also with bash commands and CLIs. I've got a Gmail CLI that I can pull

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into any projects. It's portable. It lives at my root directory. So anytime I need Gmail in my

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system, I've got Gmail triage system that I use. It just uses CLI. He then talks about the new

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programmable layer of abstraction. So not to be like everyone else on Twitter when they see Carpathi

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tweeting something, but this really rang true to me. He says there's a new programmable layer of

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of abstraction to master. When it was in the no code days, this is like five, six years ago,

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the abstraction layer that I was mastering, that he was mastering was drag and drop tools like

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web flows, apier, air table, stitching them together and making it feel like real software.

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Until you hit a limit, of course. But now instead of me thinking I've got to learn to write code

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from scratch in order for me to be able to do all this, what I need to learn is actually how to work

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with an AI agent. How can I prompt it well? How can I make sure it has the right context? And how

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can it help me understand what we're doing? How did the pieces work together and how can I improve

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my own system over time? Including all of the things like agents, sub agents, prompts,

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contexts, and memories, and skills, and hooks. So then he talks about learning from other people.

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So he says I read people like Peter Steinberger who's an actual programmer and he's shipping a lot

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and seeing in his post almost the simplicity of his system where he just talks to the model,

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let's do its thing. It doesn't really worry about extra slash commands, sub agents, hooks,

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skills, although he is coming around to skills. This just gives Ben permission and confidence that

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he doesn't need ultra complex system. So for people who are like, I need to set up all these

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things and I may need to make it complex and I need to do sub agents, I need you hooked, I need to

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do skills, just get started. Looking at Twitter, you see a lot of people optimizing or potentially

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over optimizing their own system. That can feel daunting for folks but also that's what I think

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some of the beauty of this is. It's a completely customizable system so you can make a work for you

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however you'd like. You can have a plan mode that creates with that you create with a custom

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slash command that runs for 20 minutes like Kirin does or you can just talk to the model like Peter

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does. Another thing while following other engineers is seeing their open source software,

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cloning it, using it and trying to improve it. I think this is such an important part of this

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whole process. Like Peter's recent summarized YouTube for example, Ben just took it, he removed

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the Chrome extension part, kept it as the CLI and he can talk to that anywhere he wants.

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And like Mario, reading things like his MCP post where he talks about CLIs over MCPs,

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just gave Ben the nudge to dive in more to bash and CLIs. So this is, Ben is obviously doing

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this to learn. He's on his holiday break and he says, I'm not building things for tens of thousands

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of people to use in production. So there's going to be bugs. It's probably like you too,

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the person listening to this, there's going to be issues and he's going to run, you're going to

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run into it. It's a reminder that this is a gap in your knowledge, not in the capability that you

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have now, really important point. Then he goes, my role is identifying the gaps or finding those

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gaps in thinking, how do I make sure that this never happens again? Or how do I make sure I understand

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this part of the system enough that if it's going to happen again, I will catch it. So even the

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simplest things from when he started using agents to code, like, why can't I use GitHub pages when

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I've got dynamic data and multiple users to be able to use something? That's like a very, very simple

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thing that programmers know. But it was just something that Ben learned because he was building

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something. He was trying to build something different than the tools allowed him to do so.

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So then he's like, so this is his thought process. He's basically like, well, what do we,

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what do we need to do? All you need to do is just ask the model. The model knows everything

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you don't. Just think about it like that. You can just keep asking it. It's your ever-patient

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over-the-shoulder expert programmer. You can add it to your agent's MD. I'm not a programmer.

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You need to explain things very simply for me and you can tweak it exactly how you want it.

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This might be one of the most important things that he says. Using the model as your teacher,

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your professor. This is your computer science school. You've got the best school on the planet,

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right? If you don't understand anything, you just ask questions. I really like that he says

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you're ever-patient over-the-shoulder expert programmer. Ben does contribute to real products

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during this period. He says, I've even contributed improvements to our own products. Some simple

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things, but improvements, nonetheless, which is really cool because they were a venture-backed

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company that's raised millions of dollars. There's a team of engineers at factory that's

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extremely experienced and good at what they do. He's learned a lot by just watching them,

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looking at their PRs. PRs are a good way to look at PRs as a good way to understand more about

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how this works. We have an internal lunch and learn where people say, this is how I scope new

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product features. Here's how I bugfix. Things like that, which has been helpful. Not everyone has that,

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but there are a lot of YouTube videos that talk about this sort of thing. He says,

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so this whole thing is really just a big learning experience for me and I'm really enjoying

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learning a code or learning how to work with code. Why this is different? Ben has tried to,

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maybe many of you, have tried to learn to code many times in his life and every time it was

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type in these characters, hint, enter, and do you see hello world? What he means by that is hello

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world is what prints. Basically, one of the first things that they teach you in computer science

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school or if you're learning a code is hello world. It's just like you create your first C program

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or your first website that just literally is a website or piece of software that says hello world.

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And then he says, it was kind of do this, then that, then this happens, and maybe it would have

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been helpful for me to learn all that, but I just think that's so different to what it is today.

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He says, for me to be able to build things, I've built now. If I'd taken that other path,

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I wouldn't have had a code for many months, many years to get to a point where I could feel like it

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can write the code myself. So instead of coming at it from a point of view of I understand systems,

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thinking for projects, built with code, I accidentally learned that when I was running my last

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company with no code education, you're still learning that, okay, web flow is a front end,

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Zapier is the API routes, the connective tissue, the data flows, and air table is your database.

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So I learned the systems of that previously, and I think that's helping me understand some of those

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pieces. 100%. A lot of people listening to this don't even know what API routes are, connective tissue

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data flows is. So I think that I'm happy he put that in there. It's absolutely true that he had some

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of the primitives and understood that from that perspective. He says, there is so much you can learn

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and often I'll see something that someone posts on Twitter, and I'm like, I have no idea what that

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is or what I can do with it, but I'll bet you can play around with it. He says, no piece of software

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feels unattainable. This is a huge mindset shift and so amazing. He goes, I can just get clone it

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and say, what the hell does this thing do? Okay, I've been building it. I've been thinking about this.

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Is this thing going to do anything related to what I thought? And it's just all expiration, all

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and just a lot of fun. So if you find something, just get clone it and play with it and you're going

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to learn a lot asking the silly questions. He says, there's been countless times when I think about

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silly questions to me or silly question that other programmers would never ask that have the

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permission to ask because there's no one watching me and no one shooting me down for being stupid

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or saying the wrong thing. Like, why do all these frameworks, these different types, why do we use

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all these frameworks, these different types of frameworks because they are abstractions for human

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humans writing code. So why if an LLM is so super smart, why couldn't it be just be simpler?

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Why couldn't it just be simpler code written, less dependencies, less potential surface areas

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for bugs? Is that a silly thought or is that a good thought? And then he says, I can learn that it

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might not be a silly thought. But okay, yes, there are these many projects that the model has been

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trained on, which is why often things will be built in certain frameworks. So it's just

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building up this understanding of the code world, the engineering world that I don't,

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I didn't deserve to be in, but I'm absolutely part of now. You should be asking silly questions

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and being a student of it. And I think it's going to make you a better programmer. And I'm not saying

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that everyone should become a programmer. But I do think that the more you play with these tools,

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the more of a weapon you're going to become. And you know, I actually just sort of tweeted this

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right before it came on here. I go, 2026 feels like a general lock-in moment. Daily exposure to

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playing, wow, I literally, I wrote it so quickly that it doesn't even make sense. Basically what I

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meant is, can I edit it? Yeah, we're going to edit it live here. Daily exposure to AI tools.

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It's probably the single greatest thing you can do now. Launch seven apps in a year,

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double down on one, become a weapon at your job, get promoted, find freedom, life change right now,

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matters so much. My point here is it's time to lock in, understand how these, how these things work.

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And I think that the people that come onto the other side of them are going to see a lot of,

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so there's a lot of benefits right now, even if you don't become a full stack engineer.

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Beyond vibe coding. By the way, we're almost at the end of it. Thanks for sticking with me in it.

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I'm doing this for us. Beyond vibe coding. Yes, you can call vibe coding. But I think vibe coding

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misses the point. He's actually trying to learn the systems. He's trying to understand what is

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going on, what can you improve, and how could he be a new age programmer? What is this technical class?

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He says, that's what I think is the most interesting thing here. I can't categorically call myself

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non-technical, but I also can call myself a programmer, nor what I want to. I'm part of this new

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technical class, and I don't know what it's called, but I think vibe coding gives a negative

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connotation to it. Much like no code gave a negative connotation to that group. So let us know in

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the comment section what you are, vibe coders, if you like that word, or not. He says, it feels like a

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game. Some people have likened this new way of programming to a game. Factories, the one that

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people talk about. I've never played it. He's not much of a gamer. I've never played it either. I

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am a gamer. But this whole paradigm feels like a real game to me. In the output, I'm building stuff

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that I want to build. A tons of things that don't end up anywhere on GitHub. They don't end up

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live. They're just mere explorations part of a system or a topic. Others end up published,

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and other people use it. I had a CTO fork my personal site and use it for himself. Big boss stuff

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for me. How cool is that? If someone posts, oh, I built this React Grab tool, for example. Okay,

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cool. Can I build my own? Like why? This one looks really cool. This one looks really good. Well,

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just because I want to, I can just explore things for the sake of exploring things. Then he says,

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and this is very smart. He says, every idea you've ever had can be exercise, can be explored,

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and it doesn't need to be good. You'll learn along the way. He gives you permission to

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throw things away. He says, previously, if I'd learned to code to build a really crappy version of

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I was thinking of a big idea that I had and then no one wanted it, I'd be too emotionally

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invested in that idea to just be able to throw it away. With no code, I can effectively build a

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version of that idea in an hour or a couple hours weekend. If no one liked it, no one wanted to

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pay for it. It was rubbish. Then he can just throw it away. It wasn't that much of time or energy

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into something that ultimately wasn't going to be something good for someone else. He says,

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I feel the same is true today. We're going to see an explosion of software. Many of it won't be good,

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but lots of it is already great. Spoiler alert, spoiler alert, most, we're going to see

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10,000X if not more of the amount of software. Most of it will be bad. Horrible, horrible,

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horrible AI slot, but some of it will be incredible. He says, there are expert programmers who are

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shipping things like crazy that are all good projects. We're just going to have this absolute

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plethora of coded projects out there that you can use clone tweak and remix. It's going to take a lot

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less time then if you had to learn to code or if you're reading the files or you're writing the

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files or anything like that. It's just a lot quicker. The feedback loop is quicker, the processes

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quicker. You can just do anything at any time and just consistently keep churning out stuff.

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Fail forward. The way to learn about code is just to build ahead of your capability and fail

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forward. He says, I feel like everyone who is not technical today, who wants to be in this world,

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who wants to do stuff like this can absolutely do it. They just need some permission to do it.

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To play around, you must think of it like play. Well, I'm giving you permission and Ben is giving

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you permission to go and do it. He says, sign up to a CLI agent like droid,

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say you want to build a personal website, say you want to build a little RSS fee tracker,

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a little to-do list, a little work-up app. Whatever you do, you just spin it up, start working on it,

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every little hiccup bug or issue you run into. Question it. Okay, why did this come up?

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Why did you hit those errors? You know you don't know how to code, so you shouldn't get bogged

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down with bugs. Expert programmers hit bugs all the times and you can take it to other places.

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You can go to chat chvt, your code, and give it different models for different perspectives.

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You're always going to have all the choice up there and all the different variations.

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Last but not least, he ends it by saying, just pick one. There are so many different tools,

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so many different options. Ultimately, just pick one and just stick with it. Just learn that system.

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They are all look fairly similar. Obviously, he uses droid because he works at the company,

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but also he says, they get the best output of any model. They're model agnostic.

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But use whatever you want to use. You can use Google's product, NT,

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NT gravity. You can use cursor. You can use cloud code. So use what you want.

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He says, ultimately, what I want and what I need from a tool is, is this good one going to help me

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get the furthest I can in the least amount of time with the least amount of trouble.

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The more I have to do with using the tools themselves, the harder it is. Things like IDEs,

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integrated development environments. I've tried a bunch. I use one in particular for a long time.

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It's just got so much extra stuff that I just don't need or care about. I just want to talk to a

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model. Have code written. If I need to inspect some markdown files, I can now use what I've just

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recently discovered is a file manager in the terminal. I can just look through that or I can open

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up in in Z, which is what he uses. Just to view markdown files, edit them. If it's a change log,

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for example, if you want to tweak something briefly, just go back to the CLI and just let it rip

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from there. Any tool or feature I think I'm missing, I'll have a crack at it building myself,

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of course, like a terminal file viewer. He ends it with a quote or not a quote. He ends it with a very

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succinct way that is an important message. He says this whole thing is just a really big learning

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experience for me and I'm really enjoying it. Build, fail forward and keep shipping. He's

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acknowledging the fact that you're going to fail a ton of stuff. It's about learning. It's going to

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be frustrating. It's overwhelming. There's a lot of words and vocabulary that you're not going

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to understand. But if you treat it like just the learning experiment, a sandbox for fun,

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you're going to come out of the other side. More powerful. Listen, if this was enjoyable

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and you want to commit to this, I think that would be cool. I think it would be cool if you

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build stuff in 2026. Subscribe to the Startup Ideas podcast on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple.

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I share ideas. I share tactics for getting your ideas into the real world and I make a practical

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and helpful and I give away all the sauce. Thank you for spending some time with me and if this

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was helpful, please share with a friend. I'd love to see more people ship their ideas.