The Smart Way To Program Projects

Okay, I'm going to show you the smart way to build projects. So, I built this project. It's an AI project generator where you explain a project to AI or get project ideas from it based on your goal and it'll generate a road map so you can actually build a project. It's not done yet. Sorry. I'll let you know when it is done, but I've made some good progress on it. And before you're like, "Wow, you must be so good at coding." No, I'm not. You're probably just building wrong. You see, there's a smart way to build and a dumb way to build. Once you know the difference, you'll be able to build them faster. They'll be higher quality and more people will actually care about them. And one of the smartest things you can do when building a project is to stop building what's already built. Look, let's be honest. You're probably spending 80% of your time rebuilding the exact same things. Yeah, you've probably built the same login page like 10 times by now. So my question is, how is the 10th one different from the third or fourth one or even the first one? Not much different, right? Which means you're not even learning anything new. you're just doing it again. You clearly already know what text stack you're going to use based off the comments I get off my videos. You already know the steps and how to implement them. So why are you still setting it up manually every single time? If this isn't you, you're a beginner or you've never implemented these types of features. This doesn't apply to you, genius. Let me make it simple for you. If you already know what you're doing, you've already implemented this before and you know the steps, use a template. Or better yet, let AI do it. Yes, I'm serious. Now, before you're like, "Oh, AI slop. AI can't code. AI can't even make a good project." Well, jokes's on you, because this project was made with AI. Yeah, that's right. AI [music] programmed this entire project. Specifically, Lovable, who's sponsoring this video, made most of this. The UI, the authentication, the database, setting up the AI. Lovable did all this. I mainly focused on the unique parts of the project, the parts that people actually care about because I doubt most of you looked at this project and your first thoughts were, "Oh, buddy, that sidebar right there. Woo! Beautiful." That dark mode switch A1, perfect. No, none of you cared about that. I bet you didn't care if I used a template, if AI did it. None of you cared if I did it from scratch. You just cared if it worked. But look, even if you don't want to use AI, templates are everywhere and you should at least be using those. Nex.js has starter projects. Chadzen has pre-built components. There are GitHub repos with full-on systems already set up. Everything you need that you usually rebuild, and most of them are free. So, you can't use your lack of funds as an excuse. Now, from my intellectual perspective, there's two types of shortcuts. I like to call the first one time shortcuts. These save you time on task you already know how to do. Templates, starter kits, CLI tools. If you're not using these, you're literally choosing to waste time. And then there's the second type of shortcuts. I call these ones knowledge shortcuts. These give you capabilities you don't have yet. Libraries, frameworks, APIs, and AI tools. And these types of shortcuts you should be a little bit more careful with because these ones can either increase your output or decrease your output if you don't know what you're doing with them. But if you do understand how to use these tools, you will be so much more productive. It's basically a multiplier. And if you combine both types of shortcuts, you, my friend, might be the most intellectually gifted engineer I've ever met. And it's not even that hard to do. Watch. First, I'm going to get my time shortcut, which is going to be this component website. I'm going to find a component that I want. I click it, and now I'm going to combine this with a knowledge shortcut. In this example, I'm going to use an AI tool. I'm going to click copy prompt. I select the AI that I'm going to use, copy it, and then I go to my AI code generator. I tell it what to do with this component, and I paste the prompt to add it. That's it. I just combine both types of shortcuts, and it saved me so much time. And before you're like, "Oh, that's cheating." No, it's not. Your brain is tiny. Your mental capacity operates on a scale. Best described as pint-sized. They're a shortcut. And smart people like shortcuts. I'll be honest, the best developers are lazy. Not lazy and the I don't want to work way. More so that I don't want to do unnecessary work. Every smart developer I've seen uses shortcuts. Unless it's these situations. That's the actual project. They want to learn how it works. They're not allowed to use shortcuts or the shortcut just doesn't exist yet. If it's none of these situations, smart programmers will use tools that already exist. And it makes sense. Every shortcut saves you hundreds of hours of time. Using React instead of normal JavaScript, that's like 100 plus hours saved. Using an authentication library, that saves you weeks of security research. Using AI to generate boilerplate code, that's hours of mindless typing avoided. And one of my favorite shortcuts for programming is Sloth Bites. Oh, you don't know what Sloth Bites is? Sloth Bites is my weekly newsletter where I try to make you a better programmer in about 5 minutes. Optimistic, I know. Every week I share programming advice, news, and interesting articles to make you a better programmer. And the best part, it's free. All you have to do is give me your email. But if you don't like shortcuts like these because you think it's cheating, I don't know what to tell you because I can't say you're smart. And if you're worried about becoming dependent on tools, you're already dependent on tools. Your code editor is a tool. Your programming language is a tool. The internet is a tool. The question isn't whether if you should use tools. The question is which tools to use and how to use them effectively. You save a lot of time with these shortcuts and time is the most valuable currency of them all. And smart people understand that. They understand the smartest thing you can do is focus on value. Whether you're making projects for your resume or you're working at a company, value is the only thing that matters. And I don't mean that in some vague philosophical way. If your project doesn't create value, it's worthless. Your resume project doesn't fit the job description. Recruiters do not care. It's not valuable to them. Rejection. Your project is not solving a problem someone has. Why would anyone use it? This game called GTA 6 that's taken over 10 years to make. It's not valuable because no one can play it yet. Value comes from solving real problems for real people, not from clean code. When it comes to value, it usually goes like this. Value equals the size of the problem solved. The bigger the problem you solve, the bigger the value. So, a smart thing you can do is optimize your projects for value. But the question is, how do you figure out what the problem is in the first place? The answer to that is feedback. Try this experiment with me. Think of a random project idea, any idea. Go into an AI code editor. I'll use Lovable, and start typing out a random project you want, and let AI generate it. Once it's done building, test it out. You'll start to realize fast, wo, there's a lot of problems here. problems you didn't even think about when you had the idea. So, what do you do next? You give the AI feedback and it iterates on it. Oh, this needs a backend with user authentication. Oh, you need to add features using OpenAI in Gemini. And all of a sudden, wow, much better, more valuable and useful. This is exactly what will happen to your projects when you get feedback because now you have a better understanding of what the problems are because feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power. This applies to everything. Building for yourself, you iterate based on your own feedback. Building for your resume, apply to jobs and see if you get an interview. If you don't get any, that's good feedback that you need to iterate on it or show it to someone working at the company. If you're building to make money, show it to potential customers. Get feedback on it and iterate until they pay for it. The pattern is always the same. Build something, get feedback, iterate, and repeat. Which means one of the most important things here is iteration speed because iteration takes time. And usually the biggest bottleneck is writing the actual code because you most likely already know the steps to fix the problem. You just need to code it and that's what takes time. But we can speed it up with shortcuts. We've already talked about this, but that's up to you. If you won't use these shortcuts, someone else will. Overall, whenever you're building a project, you should be focusing on value and use shortcuts strategically. Iterate fast because the faster you test ideas and get feedback, the faster you create value. Projects aren't impressive because of the code. It's impressive because of the problem it solved. Focus on the unique parts, the parts that creates value and the parts that make the project different. And that's going to be the main difference between building the dumb way and building the smart way. Personally, I'll be using tools like Lovable because it lets me iterate in hours instead of weeks. If you want to try out Lovable, you can check out the link in the description. And if you're a student, you can get a student discount where you get 50% off, which is pretty cool. But yeah, I hope your brain got a little bit bigger. I'll see you in the next video.

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