I haven’t felt this energy of excitement and possibility in 25 years. I’m 56, and after using AI , I have the same feeling of potential for personal and business development that I had in my twenties.
It’s a feeling of huge potential, and if you’re a creative like me, it makes you want to build, create, and share.
And it’s not just about the feeling, but actually being able to create and experience tangible results.
In my spare time, over about two weeks, I created an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of a custom chatbot, that uses a trusted knowledge base about transformation, healing, but mostly health at the moment.
The most awesome ?.. I created it without writing a single line of code.
This experience awed because I write code, but I would never been able to write the code the AI did becuase it uses concepts I wasn’t even aware of.
I have to be transparent here, I haven’t coded regualrly in a few years but even then I wouldn’t have been able to write what the AI wrote.
In fact, I have no idea how the code works, but it works.
Using AI to code (and create in other ways) has showed me that there are no barriers to creating espeically if you fear not personally having up to date knowledge or experience in your own mind.
AI is and will change the ‘game’ for everyone—from young entrepreneurs to experienced professionals who think they’ve seen it all.
My ‘wakeup’ moment: Building a working app in the time with the minimal funding.
My ideas was to create a custom chatbot to help me find releavant information from many trusted sources such as books, documentaries, reports, etc. This used to take from 30 mins to hours depending on whether I recalled where appropriate information to an enquiry couild be, having to find and note it (that’s if I remembered where it was).
I wanted to speed this up with RAG (Retrieval Augmenated Generation) where the AI is instructed to only use custom sources to ‘search’ and repsond from.
The financial cost was suprisingly low:
- Coding: I started using Claude Desktop, then VS Code with Cline & Roo Code, and eventually settled with Claude Code. To be transparent, I spent up to about $50USD per month testing various AI models (Claude Sonnet & Haiku, Gemini Pro & Flash, and a few others), but I now know I could develop the same app from scratch in my spare time with just £18 GBP Claude Pro subscirption per month.
- Hosting: The entire application runs on a shared server, costing $2.49 USD per month.
- Brain: I used a self-hosted instance of n8n for workflow automation at around $10 USD cper month.
What is n8n? it’s a workflow automation tool that lets you connect different applications and automate tasks without needing to code.
The custom knowledgebase
An AI model requires a way to understand and search information based on a user querry (e.g. What actually creates healthy?). This is done by converting the both the user querry and custom knowledgebase into numerical representations called “embeddings”, storing the custom knowledge in a vector database which is the format for emebings, and then matching the pattern of the numerical representation of ther user query to similar patterns in the vector database, creating a set of results that best match the query, then formatted by the LLM to create a response.
A lot of people mentioned using Pinecone and I came across their AI assistant called Pinecone Assistant, where I could simply upload my custom knowledge base and it created the embeddings and vector database.
While it worked, the Pinecone Assiatent solution was costing 15-25p per response. This was not practical for regular or mass use.
After researching, I came across people on YouTube talking baout n8n and Supabase to create and search vector databases. Supabase has a generous free tier for its vector database which I felt was good enough for testing and solved the cost per response issue.
I kept the final tech stack to a minimal to keep it easy to manage, code, and develop. It’s running PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS (with Tailwind), MySQL, and Supabase—all from a simple shared server.
Why I let go of WordPress
I initially planned to integrate the chatbot with a WordPress site that already had user registration and login features, course content using a course plugin, and other plugins and content whose functinality and output were required.
But I was getting tired of WordPress:
- Clunkiness: The thought of integrating my custom code into the huge WordPress codebase felt daunting.
- Update issues: Plugin and theme updates would often break layouts and functionality, which was getting embarassing because I often didn’t realise first unless I tested the site after every WordPress and plugin update (whch I didn’t).
- Waiting for support: When plugin developer support weas required, it would often take days to get a response from a developer and to fix it.
With AI coding, I could often fix issues in seconds, and also create new features in minutes and test and make tem live also in seconds to a few minutes.
I went all in : I rebuilt all the features I was using from WordPress from the ground up and integrated them directly with my chatbot’s code and account management system.
My custom app now does more than WordPress and its collection of paid and free plugins ever did for me. It’s faster, 100% customised, and remains customisable quickly.
The power of AI-accelerated development
I accomplished all of this in my spare time, dedicating about an hour a day over a couple of months. If I had worked on it full-time (e.g. 7 hours a day, weekdays only), I could have built this entire MVP in just 2 to 3 weeks.
The speed of development and even fixing issues was so fast that I polished it off the MVP, showed it to a few friends, and am now developing it further based on real-world feedback.
Even though I have a coding background, please note that I have not written a single line of code for this project. I siimply researched what I thought shold be used and created but also asked the AI model to suggest anything better, which it did most of the time.
The only “coding” I’ve done is changing 3 variables to switch between my test site and the live one. The test site runs exactly the same code as the live site, apart from the 3 variables. That’s why I can go from testing and being happy with the test site to live in about 10 seconds.
This experience has borught more ideas for features that other SAAS (Software as a Service) products offer—like feature request boards, blogs, etc.
I can now see myself building standalone micro or even fulll blown apps and integrating them with the app I’ve developed. This has just brought the thought of splitting the course system I’ve develolped into its own SAAS product.
AI equalising knowledge for personal and business develpoment
Using AI isn’t just about building apps. There is a fundamental shift happening in how we work and how we create value. I can see the days being numbered for many established SAAS products, both free (like WordPress) and paid, unless their creators adopt AI and speed and improve their developments.
The disruption extends far beyond software. Knowledge-based work is being transformed. Law, marketing, content creation, research—any field that relies on accessing and synthesising information is in the early days of a productivity revolution.
I’ve experienced this in other areas of life. I recently had to handle a legal matter. Instead of hiring a solicitor or barrister, I used AI. Knowing how to prompt it correctly—what information to provide and what to ignore—I was able to get more or less the outcome I wanted in court.
- Total Time Spent: 30 minutes of my own work.
- Total Cost: About $10 USD.
- Potential Savings: Thousands of pounds in legal fees and weeks of back and forth discussions with legal ‘experts’.
This same efficiency applies everywhere: generating letters, social media posts, course materials, images, audio, and so much more.
An invitation
I’m sharing this because I genuinely believe we are living through a major shift in human productivity, one that can massively improve the quality of life for everyone. This technology has reignited a passions and a sense of purpose in me that had been not as firelyt or dormant for decades.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in your twenties and full of ideas, in your fifties and looking for a new purpose, or somewhere in the middle, thinking you’re at the top of your game. AI is a tool that can amplify your intellect, wisdom, creativity, and impact in ways you may not yet imagine.
The app I’ve been developing is live, and I would be honoured if you took a look: https://tryit.tv
Your honest feedback (positive or critical) would be useful as I continue to ddevelop it.
This journey has made me realize there is so much to explore and share. That’s why I’ve created a space for like-minded people to connect, ask questions, and share their own discoveries.
Let’s connect and create together:
- Leave a comment below: Share your thoughts, your own AI experiences, or any questions you have. Let’s start a conversation right here.
- Join my new Discord Server: I’ve just created new chat anf forum channels on it, so you’ll be one of the first to join. Let’s build a community. Click here to join the Discord.
- Get in touch directly: Have a more specific idea or question? Feel free to reach out via my Contact Page.
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