This week I made a website that teaches people how to use their computer's terminal. It has a raccoon named Byte, a little Clippy for the iPad-in-a-shopping-cart generation. It's free and I think it's cute.

Terminal Teacher — learn the terminal with Byte!

But I didn't make it, not really. I project-managed it.

That disclaimer matters, and to explain why I have to go back to when I had less hair on my human body.

Story Time

Early 90s, late afternoon. My grandpappy had just bought a computer and kept it locked away. One day he asked if I wanted to learn how to use it. I was excited and a little scared. I'd never even touched one before.

He flicked the switch. Five minutes later the box came to life. A blinking cursor in a sea of sepia.

"Does it have any games?"

"It sure does."

He typed in a number, something lame like ten. The terminal counted up to it, one line at a time.

"Go ahead, type in any number. Keep it under 100 though."

"Why?"

"It slows the computer down."

I typed 99. The rows filled in one by one. A minute later we hit the end.

"Okay, that's enough for now," he said, and shut the machine down.

I believed him about the 100 thing even though he was almost certainly making it up. Not maliciously. The limit wasn't based on the machine, just his personal patience with a kid who might break a $5000 bean counter.

I'd love to tell you that moment ruined me for computers, and for a while that's the story I told. Family, teachers, professors, all of them steering me away from the thing I was curious about.

It's also mostly an excuse

I took a Cisco networking class in high school with a couple friends. The teacher was a slow-talking southern man who cleared his throat every other word. I remember learning the difference between WAN and LAN. After that we shared test answers on a Windows ME messaging app one of the students launched through PowerPoint. I had more fun breaking the rules than learning them.

That's the pattern. I'd get interested, hit the part where something broke, and leave walking away with zero new skills. Some of those guys went into IT and web design. I stuck with video, which made sense to me, and settled into the Mac ecosystem because it felt clean and unbreakable in a way Windows didn't. For two decades my relationship with code stayed almost nonexistent, and I told myself that was a door somebody else had closed.

Then a few years ago I got into self-hosting and Docker containers, and I had no choice but to learn how to copy and paste other people's hard work.

Which actually got the job done, and that was confusing. I'd paste a wall of commands into a terminal, containers would spin up, a service would appear at some IP address on my network, and I'd have no idea what any of it meant.

But I couldn't back out of a folder without Googling it. I couldn't edit a line of text in nano without Bing'ing that too. I was operating a machine by proxy with nothing but blind trust.

Confusing yet somehow liberating.

Nobody stood over the machine waiting for me to finish. When something broke I fixed it, or I broke it worse and rebuilt it. Regardless, the little server and future computers have since survived.

Checkmate, gramps.

Turns out the curiosity had always been there. What I never had was anybody willing to explain what I was looking at, and no amount of pasting was going to fill that in for me.

Which brings me back to Byte

The site started as something for me and me alone. I wanted a tutor to cram commands into my head so I'd understand what I was actually doing when I published a web app instead of pattern-matching a tutorial. Then it escalated, as these things do, and became something I thought a kid might use.

I'm not going to pretend that makes me a developer. There's a whole delusional group online right now announcing that they vibe-coded an app and are therefore engineers.

That's stupid.

Pretending these tools don't exist is also kind of dumb, but it comes with a lot more online support so I get it. Not every person making something with Claude or Codex is a grifter flooding the App Store with cookie-cutter garbage.

At least, I hope not. I know I'm not.

Also there's Aaron. He's building a site to help retired people find work that gives them a reason to get up in the morning. He's not doing it to get rich (I think).

He's doing it because he's worried about what we're going to do 10 years from now, and thought somebody should fix that.

It always comes back to the idea

Google Wave had an army of engineers and no one used it. Flappy Bird was made by one guy and was used 10 bajillion times more than Google Wave.

Google Wave sucked.

Today, those two worlds are smashing together and it's chaotic. I like the chaos. I like watching change happen and seeing how people react to it.

I've been project-managed my whole adult life. It's not fun. Plus, there's always somebody above you ready to take credit for the work you did.

This isn't that. Nobody got their credit taken. I had an idea, I described it, I argued with a machine for a while, and something exists now that didn't before. I'm not proud of it the way I'd be proud of creating life or completing a crossword puzzle. It's something more adjacent to proud.

I can admit LLMs write code better than I ever will. They still can't write really good or in my voice. They can’t edit videos in my style. Maybe someday. For now the balance works: if AI wraps up my work early so I can spend the evening with people I like, that's a win.

Bonus if it helps me build something useful for strangers I'll never meet.

A blast from the past

I know that somewhere in Pasadena there's a younger version of me still waiting for permission to type 101.

So an older version of me hops into his vibe-coded time machine, made with just a few tokens of quantum compute to pay the little guy a visit.

I emerge from my time sphere coughing up a thick, pink liquid, "The computer was never in danger. Type whatever number you want! Break something, then find out why it broke. That's how you learn."