Welcome to Conjuring Code. My name is Ian Varley.
This is a brand new podcast about how you, as a regular person, can now build computer apps, software, without needing to be a professional software engineer, because now you can use coding agents to do the nitty-gritty technical work, like writing code, debugging problems, things like that, while you spend your time and energy on the parts that are actually fun, like figuring out what problems are even worth solving, and solving them in a way that makes life a little more delightful.
Now you might not even believe me that this true, maybe you think I'm exaggerating, or trying to sell you something, but I'm not; it is absolutely true, and if you want to see for yourself, just to go ConjuringCode.com/start and type in something like "make me an app to track my vintage pencil collection", and it'll do it right before your eyes, you can watch it generate the code.
The reason this is possible, when this wasn't possible, even, like, last year, is that large language models have now crossed a threshold where they can take whatever you say and translate it into code; and at this point, most of the time, that code is now just as good as it would be if it were written by a professional software engineer like me. If not better.
Some people call this AI-assisted engineering. Some people call it vibe coding. But I just think about it as how we all will build software from now on.
And what that means for you is that a lot of the stuff that made programming unapproachable or out of reach for most people, that stuff is gone now. You might think of yourself as someone who’s “not technical”, but that doesn’t matter any more. If you can think clearly, and you know how to ask for what you want, AI can code it, and that lets a lot more people in on the fun of programming.
Now, that’s all amazing, but to me, that’s the beginning of the story, not the end. Because as it turns out, thinking clearly and knowing what to ask for it is a little bit trickier than it sounds. The AI can do the coding, yes, but if you don’t know what to ask for or what’s even possible then you’re not gonna get good results.
So that’s the purpose of this podcast: to humanize this new outlandish ability with real people who are doing it, and to help you learn what is possible and how to ask for it and how to think clearly about software. What makes it tick, and maybe more importantly, what makes it good, and why would you even care in the first place?
Now, a reasonable question might be, Ian, why should I listen to you on this topic? There’s a lot of podcasts out there. Well, I have been a software engineer and architect for almost 30 years, but I’ve also spent time as a middle and high school teacher and I care a lot about helping people actually understand things. And I think this is one of the most important and exciting things to happen in the world of technology maybe ever, right? Instead of maybe one percent of 1% of the population being able to make software, now all of a sudden almost anyone can. And the possibilities that opens up are endless. But I think could all use a little inspiration from fellow humans, hearing what they're using it for, and what they learned along the way. Software is not the best way to solve every problem, but I bet as you learn more, you will start to realize that it’s a solution to a lot more problems than you might think.
Now, some people may have already turned this off as soon as they heard me say the word AI and I wouldn’t blame you. Lots of people are making lots of promises right now about what AI can or should do and to be honest with you, I think a lot of that is bunk. And actually, I think a lot of it might even be harmful for us and our brains. Especially young brains. I don’t think it’s good to let AI read for you or write for you or think for you. And this podcast is not about about using AI to do any of those things. If you follow along here, you're still going to need to do your own thinking.
But at least for me, making software is kind of a special case here, because specifically, what AI is doing for us here is taking something that was artificially, annoyingly hard —hard for bad reasons— and just getting you past the bad hard stuff so you can actually do the good hard stuff, which is really fun. And there’s plenty of good hard stuff to do. But the thing that was keeping you from that fun, was all of this annoying bad hard stuff.
Here’s an analogy imagine you were sitting down to write a letter. You get a pencil and a piece of paper, and you write the first paragraph, but then when you’re done, you look down at it and you see that it only wrote every other word. And you’re like that’s weird, so you get a different pencil and a new piece of paper, and this time words are all backwards, and you realize that you were using a backwards paper without realizing it, so then you get a different pen and as soon as you touch the pen to the paper, it just falls apart into pieces, so then you get a different paen, but this one only works if you hum happy birthday while you’re writing with it.
And, I know this is a silly story, but this is like almost exactly what it feels like to try to make modern software. There’s just this endless stream of stupid, mysterious problems that block you from doing it and waste your time. And most people, they don't have the time or patience for that.
And so, over the last few decades, the people like me who make a living as a programmer, like the way you do that is you just have to have a really abnormally high tolerance for memorizing all of that stupid trivia, and patiently debugging all of these mysterious errors, while also somehow keeping track of the actual thing that they were trying to build and making it good. And you know what? That hasn’t worked very well, and the result of that is that most software you can use is not very good and it’s much more expensive than it should be to create, it takes companies with hundreds or thousands of professional software engineers at companies like Microsoft and Google to make even basic useful software.
Now, just to be clear, in the future, there are still gonna be professional software engineers, and they are going to continue to work on the really hard interesting cutting edge problems.
But what has changed is that you don't have to be a professional any more to do the thing. The same way that you don't have to be a professional chef to cook yourself a meal.
Which then brings us back to our silly paper and pencil analogy . If you can just sit down with a working pencil and piece of paper, then you face the interesting problem which is What do you wanna say? how do you write a good letter?
And that’s now where we are with software, finally, after all these years. It's just not scary and gross any more.
So that’s what this podcast is about. It’s about taking that journey one click deeper, not "hey cool look at what I can do with AI" but "hey, AI gets all this pointless crap out of my way so now I can make software. What should I make? And what are the basic concepts I need to know so I can ask for the right things, like: what’s a database and why would I want one? Or, if I want to make a mobile app, how would I get started? These are all questions you can just ask AI of course, but you can't ask if you don't even know what to ask. So what I hope you get out of this podcast, in addition to it not feeling scary anymore, is that you'll have some inkling of what's possible, and how to ask for it.
On this podcast, we're going to talk to a whole spectrum of people, from total beginners who are taking their first steps programming, to people who’ve been doing it for a while. I promise that it will not gonna be a stream of insider talk or lingo, which is what most of the other AI programming and vibecoding podcasts are about. This one really is for everybody else, for the normal people out there in the world who never even considered making software before, or if they tried, may be got turned off by how gross and difficult it is. Well guess what? It’s not gross and difficult anymore and you can do it and that’s what this podcast is about.
So hope you tune in to our episodes and I’m glad to have you with me on this journey you can find out lots more about this podcast. Just go to conjuringcode.com/podcast and you will find episodes, articles, show notes, transcripts, and lots more.
If this sounds exciting to you, and if you’d like what you hear, please share this with one person, just think of the one person you know who might actually find this interesting and just send it their way. Maybe you can even think of two. And of course, good rating in your podcast player or on youtube goes a long way towards making this discoverable for other people.
Thanks, and I hope you tune in to the first episode.
This is a brand new podcast about how you, as a regular person, can now build computer apps, software, without needing to be a professional software engineer, because now you can use coding agents to do the nitty-gritty technical work, like writing code, debugging problems, things like that, while you spend your time and energy on the parts that are actually fun, like figuring out what problems are even worth solving, and solving them in a way that makes life a little more delightful.
Now you might not even believe me that this true, maybe you think I'm exaggerating, or trying to sell you something, but I'm not; it is absolutely true, and if you want to see for yourself, just to go ConjuringCode.com/start and type in something like "make me an app to track my vintage pencil collection", and it'll do it right before your eyes, you can watch it generate the code.
The reason this is possible, when this wasn't possible, even, like, last year, is that large language models have now crossed a threshold where they can take whatever you say and translate it into code; and at this point, most of the time, that code is now just as good as it would be if it were written by a professional software engineer like me. If not better.
Some people call this AI-assisted engineering. Some people call it vibe coding. But I just think about it as how we all will build software from now on.
And what that means for you is that a lot of the stuff that made programming unapproachable or out of reach for most people, that stuff is gone now. You might think of yourself as someone who’s “not technical”, but that doesn’t matter any more. If you can think clearly, and you know how to ask for what you want, AI can code it, and that lets a lot more people in on the fun of programming.
Now, that’s all amazing, but to me, that’s the beginning of the story, not the end. Because as it turns out, thinking clearly and knowing what to ask for it is a little bit trickier than it sounds. The AI can do the coding, yes, but if you don’t know what to ask for or what’s even possible then you’re not gonna get good results.
So that’s the purpose of this podcast: to humanize this new outlandish ability with real people who are doing it, and to help you learn what is possible and how to ask for it and how to think clearly about software. What makes it tick, and maybe more importantly, what makes it good, and why would you even care in the first place?
Now, a reasonable question might be, Ian, why should I listen to you on this topic? There’s a lot of podcasts out there. Well, I have been a software engineer and architect for almost 30 years, but I’ve also spent time as a middle and high school teacher and I care a lot about helping people actually understand things. And I think this is one of the most important and exciting things to happen in the world of technology maybe ever, right? Instead of maybe one percent of 1% of the population being able to make software, now all of a sudden almost anyone can. And the possibilities that opens up are endless. But I think could all use a little inspiration from fellow humans, hearing what they're using it for, and what they learned along the way. Software is not the best way to solve every problem, but I bet as you learn more, you will start to realize that it’s a solution to a lot more problems than you might think.
Now, some people may have already turned this off as soon as they heard me say the word AI and I wouldn’t blame you. Lots of people are making lots of promises right now about what AI can or should do and to be honest with you, I think a lot of that is bunk. And actually, I think a lot of it might even be harmful for us and our brains. Especially young brains. I don’t think it’s good to let AI read for you or write for you or think for you. And this podcast is not about about using AI to do any of those things. If you follow along here, you're still going to need to do your own thinking.
But at least for me, making software is kind of a special case here, because specifically, what AI is doing for us here is taking something that was artificially, annoyingly hard —hard for bad reasons— and just getting you past the bad hard stuff so you can actually do the good hard stuff, which is really fun. And there’s plenty of good hard stuff to do. But the thing that was keeping you from that fun, was all of this annoying bad hard stuff.
Here’s an analogy imagine you were sitting down to write a letter. You get a pencil and a piece of paper, and you write the first paragraph, but then when you’re done, you look down at it and you see that it only wrote every other word. And you’re like that’s weird, so you get a different pencil and a new piece of paper, and this time words are all backwards, and you realize that you were using a backwards paper without realizing it, so then you get a different pen and as soon as you touch the pen to the paper, it just falls apart into pieces, so then you get a different paen, but this one only works if you hum happy birthday while you’re writing with it.
And, I know this is a silly story, but this is like almost exactly what it feels like to try to make modern software. There’s just this endless stream of stupid, mysterious problems that block you from doing it and waste your time. And most people, they don't have the time or patience for that.
And so, over the last few decades, the people like me who make a living as a programmer, like the way you do that is you just have to have a really abnormally high tolerance for memorizing all of that stupid trivia, and patiently debugging all of these mysterious errors, while also somehow keeping track of the actual thing that they were trying to build and making it good. And you know what? That hasn’t worked very well, and the result of that is that most software you can use is not very good and it’s much more expensive than it should be to create, it takes companies with hundreds or thousands of professional software engineers at companies like Microsoft and Google to make even basic useful software.
Now, just to be clear, in the future, there are still gonna be professional software engineers, and they are going to continue to work on the really hard interesting cutting edge problems.
But what has changed is that you don't have to be a professional any more to do the thing. The same way that you don't have to be a professional chef to cook yourself a meal.
Which then brings us back to our silly paper and pencil analogy . If you can just sit down with a working pencil and piece of paper, then you face the interesting problem which is What do you wanna say? how do you write a good letter?
And that’s now where we are with software, finally, after all these years. It's just not scary and gross any more.
So that’s what this podcast is about. It’s about taking that journey one click deeper, not "hey cool look at what I can do with AI" but "hey, AI gets all this pointless crap out of my way so now I can make software. What should I make? And what are the basic concepts I need to know so I can ask for the right things, like: what’s a database and why would I want one? Or, if I want to make a mobile app, how would I get started? These are all questions you can just ask AI of course, but you can't ask if you don't even know what to ask. So what I hope you get out of this podcast, in addition to it not feeling scary anymore, is that you'll have some inkling of what's possible, and how to ask for it.
On this podcast, we're going to talk to a whole spectrum of people, from total beginners who are taking their first steps programming, to people who’ve been doing it for a while. I promise that it will not gonna be a stream of insider talk or lingo, which is what most of the other AI programming and vibecoding podcasts are about. This one really is for everybody else, for the normal people out there in the world who never even considered making software before, or if they tried, may be got turned off by how gross and difficult it is. Well guess what? It’s not gross and difficult anymore and you can do it and that’s what this podcast is about.
So hope you tune in to our episodes and I’m glad to have you with me on this journey you can find out lots more about this podcast. Just go to conjuringcode.com/podcast and you will find episodes, articles, show notes, transcripts, and lots more.
If this sounds exciting to you, and if you’d like what you hear, please share this with one person, just think of the one person you know who might actually find this interesting and just send it their way. Maybe you can even think of two. And of course, good rating in your podcast player or on youtube goes a long way towards making this discoverable for other people.
Thanks, and I hope you tune in to the first episode.
