Hotwiring My Brain: How AI Took Me From No Code to a Native App (Transmission #330 Part II)

WRITTEN BY: JERED DENNIS

[Adapted from From Zero Code to Swipe Home: How AI Rewired My Brain]

Before May 5, 2025, I knew my computer basics—processors, storage, and screens—but I couldn’t tell you how they talked to each other. Writing code? Architecting a full-blown application? These were in a different planetary realm.

If you’d told me then that, less than six months later, I’d be using my own keyboard to build a working mobile app, I would have laughed you out of the room. Or assumed you meant a no-code drag-and-drop prototype.

But the MVP I built wasn’t drag-and-drop.

It was more like what happened to Jobe in The Lawnmower Man—minus the VR headsets and nootropic injections. My mind-expanding tech was AI.

In the beginning, I leaned heavily on William Grim, Swipe Home’s Technical and AI Advisor. I must have asked him fifty times to just do the build himself. Fifty times, he told me no.

At the time, it felt like a roadblock. Now I realize it was the push I needed.

When someone won’t hand you the keys, you either stop driving… or you learn to hotwire the engine yourself. My “hotwire” was AI.

The initial spark came from ChatGPT—my first collaborator. I could feed it an idea and get back code.

Then William told me about Devin.ai. That was my first taste that AI could execute, not just explain.

From there, I built a Laravel version of Swipe Home, about 90% complete. But the more I worked, the more I saw the limitations of a mobile-first web app.

So I pivoted.

Native app. Flutter build. New game entirely.

THE STACK THAT BUILT ME
By then, I wasn’t only leveraging ChatGPT. I’d built a full-stack AI arsenal, running with: