As a designer, AI didn't transform me into an engineer. It gave me the material, and the freedom, to design the way I always wanted.
I've been writing code for 15+ years. I never felt like a "real" developer.
Not because I couldn't write code, but because I was always more interested in designing with it than mastering the technical depth.
I started as a web designer/developer. Tutorials in 10 tabs. PHP, WordPress, jQuery everywhere. I was hacking things together until they worked. I wasn't thinking about best practices or perfomance. I was thinking:
How does this work? How can it be simpler? How do I make these two things play nicely together?
I'd pick a jQuery slider plugin. Then another one for sticky headers. Then something else for animations. And then spend hours trying to make them all coexist.
Whenever things broke, I'd go straight to StackOverflow and bombard it with questions, without really understanding all the technicalities. Just hacking my way forward.
(If you check my Stack Overflow profile today, I'm still in the top 20% of users. That should tell you how many questions I asked back then)
Looking back, I was a designer all along. I just didn't call myself that yet.
I was shaping experiences. Reducing friction. Making things feel easier. Code was just the material I used to get there.
Now, with AI, I've come full circle.
AI gives me back that same freedom to skip the ceremony, to skip the polish-first mindset, and work directly with the real thing. To design in code again. To build, test, feel, and iterate fast.
AI didn't turn me into an engineer. It gave me back the freedom to design the way I always did, and multiplied it.
For my Romanian friends, I've just published a new game on the App Stores (iOS and Android)!
It's the classic "Integrame" that our parents used to play, or if you're old enough, the one you used to play, but now on your phone.
iOS: https://t.co/s89zOS8NON
Android: https://t.co/6DoCdoxlK2
I got tired of watching good ideas die in mockups. So I learned to ship. Pick the bottleneck. I'll fix it.
What I do:
- 0→1 products; idea to usable v1, fast
- Leaky flows; onboarding, activation, and such
- Landing pages that convert
Design + build.