How the heck I went from Non-Dev to build my first tech baby with Buildspace?

February 19, 2023

After two years of going back and forth with Ecosupply, a sustainable but traditional business idea that my co-founder to be and I almost brought to life, I realized that in order to move forward, I needed more technology applied to sustainability. However, I didn't know how to do it. You might be thinking, "This is a piece of cake, why don't you just develop it?" Well, the truth is that I wasn't lacking willingness, but I'm not a developer, so I didn't know how to build things. Luckily, in 2023, there's a super cool thing called Buildspace where you can basically, following Farza's instructions, deliver your first tech baby. And also, there is this other cool thing called ChatGPT that can serve as your personal tutor.

So, today, I'm writing the story of my fun journey as a non-dev going through one of Buildspace's "Builds" using Farza's and ChatGPT's help.

It all started around two weekends ago when Carl and I decided to take the weekend to do some Buildspace stuff. The demo day of the previous N&W cohort was our starting point.

With our "Mate de leche y coco" ready, we started our separate journeys inside Buildspace. Although we both picked the same "Build," the AI Writing Assistant, our experiences differed because Carl is a senior dev haha. The first hour of building and interacting with GPT3 was hilarious. Since I already work on a project using AI to generate images and video from text (Art Official Intelligence built on top of Lens Protocol), it was easy peasy to create a prompt to have a conversation with T-Rex and E.T. through GPT3. However, this was my first encounter with an API directly, so learning about hyperparameters and how to control the outputs of the language model using temperature, as well as learning about chaining prompts, was beyond interesting.

But things started to get out of control when the coding part began. It was an emotional and mental rollercoaster. Remember, my friends, I don't know how to write code. At the beginning of the build, Farza said that if I didn't know JavaScript, I could gently go to Scrimba to learn and come back. As usual, I said, "Thanks for the advice, but I will do it my own way!" So I moved forward with the next part of the build.

The first step was already difficult for me: how to clone a repo? I didn't know how to do it, so I reached out to my old and reliable personal tutor, ChatGPT, to ask for help.

Fortunately, I already had Git and Github installed locally because I use Obsidian on two computers, so I need both versions of Obsidian synced. According to Farza, I should open the command line interface (CLI) and enter some commands to clone the repo and then enter these:

```

# cd into the repo
cd gpt3-writer-starter

# install next if you don't have it
yarn add next react react-dom

# run it
yarn dev

```

But again, I didn't know what a CLI was neither where the fck was I supposed to paste the above, so I asked for help again

I did everything ChatGPT and Farza said, however it didn't work. Can you believe it? But a calm sea never made a skilled sailor (?) so I kept going.

OF COURSE, it was not going to work... Guess what? I didn't have the tools to start building installed. Like seriously, I didn't have Node.js or Next.js installed! LOL. I was confused as heck. But I didn't mind. After an hour or so, I managed to install everything and run "yarn dev" to make the site come to life on my local host.

During this build, I not only learned about code structure, AI, and UI, but also about myself. The way Buildspace presents challenges is the way I like to learn things. These "knock your head against the wall" situations are the things that motivate me to keep going, unlike boring video tutorials where people talk for hours and you're supposed to take notes and then apply them.

So thanks a16z for giving Farza, and therefore all of us, the opportunity to build things on our own.

I continued building, feeling like a sir, until Farza asked us to do what the image below shows, and I started feeling lost again. My moment of glory was gone... Please Farza, let me extend my glorious moment. Fortunately, ChatGPT was right there to help me when I couldn't find the Index.js file.

You won't believe this, but up until now, I had only been working with my computer terminal. I didn't have a code editor, and I didn't think I would need one since the only coding I had done was writing C++ on Linux over 12 years ago. More recently, I had been working with Openprocessing to start my journey as an algorithmic artist. This was my first time facing the need to install a code editor. Luckily, Carl recommended Visual Studio Code, so I installed it and finally understood what index.js was and where to paste the portion of code Farza had provided. The funny part of the story was that when I went to the localhost URL to see the changes, an awful message popped up saying "500 Internal Server Error". It turned out that when I closed my local terminal to install Visual Studio Code, I had unknowingly killed the local host site on my browser.

El mate de leche y coco was finished, but the night was young, and I was determined to see a decent output from my writer assistant through the UI that Farza had provided. So, I kept going until my first prompt and call to the OpenAI API worked. In that exact moment, it worked, and I actually cried.

(Below you'll find the link to my brand new sustainable marketing assistant, don't get anxious)

"SustAInability made easy" is my newborn project, and it happens to be my first. Based on The Responsible AI Manifesto for Marketing and Business I built an AI assistant for companies taking their first steps towards sustainability that don't know where to start. With the UN Sustainable Development Goals in mind, I decided to create this tool so business can start exploring the idea of taking action to build a better world.