Skillbuild #3 – Coding with AI & Writing with Clarity
Lessons from vibe coding, Zinsser, and the slow craft of getting better.
Welcome to Skillbuild — weekly notes on rapid learning and skill building.
This week:
🤖 Vibe Coding: First impressions and building apps with AI
✍️ Writing Practice: What Zinsser taught me
📚 Books I read: Never Let Me Go, Zinsser’s On Writing Well, DOSE
Let’s dive in.
New Skill: 🤖Vibe Coding
Vibe coding, coined by OpenAI founder Andrej Karpathy, is the art of building small web tools with LLMs through chat. Think: telling ChatGPT to “build me a pomodoro timer,” and having it generate working code in minutes. That’s the approach behind Build Your Own AI App course by Nat Eliason, which I dove into last week.
I built three apps in the first few lessons and one thing is clear: AI coding is wild. Some early thoughts:
Vibe coding won’t replace traditional coding — but it’s perfect for weekend projects.
Solo creators will soon be able to build single-use apps for personal or internal use without writing much code. Cutting out the middleman.
These tools may not become startups — but they don’t need to. I see a future where online entrepreneurs bundle micro-apps with their services, giving their audience and their clients tools tailored to their needs. Perfect-market fit.
What I Built So Far
So far in the course, I’ve built:
A pomodoro timer 🍅
A custom blog (still in progress)
A first principles note-summariser using an LLM — you can upload notes and it pulls out the first principles.
Early reflection: once you grasp the core principles, the possibilities feel endless.
The goal: Build my blog
Right now I’m focused on rebuilding my blog — something fast, lightweight, self-hosted, and more flexible than my current Webflow setup. Webflow offers great visual control, but custom code gives me more freedom (and no ongoing fees).
The biggest challenge with Vibe Coding so far is precision. In Webflow, you get real-time visual feedback. With AI, even small design tweaks, like padding can break things unless you go into the code yourself. I find myself missing the fine-grain control as a designer.
Long term, I also want to rebuild some of the internal tools we use in my retail business. Right now, they’re a patchwork of spreadsheets, AppSheet, and duct tape. Replacing them with clean, focused apps would be a big win.
Takeaways and next steps
The biggest lesson? You still need to understand the fundamentals. The AI does the coding, but you have to guide it.
Understand the stack: platforms, libraries, and stack matters. I spent hours asking things like, “Should I use an SSG like Astro? 11ty? Next.js with App Router?” If you have no idea what that means. I didn’t either. This is where I’ll be investing most of my time: understanding the building blocks that shape how a site is built. I had to restart a few times because the wrong choice took the whole project off-course.
Learn by Building: You have to build your own trial-and-error loops. You need experience to know what you want — and recognise bad output when you see it.
AI ≠ Auto-Pilot: AI can guide you, but it can also lead you down the wrong path if you don’t see it coming.
Right now, my main project is the blog. I’m not sure yet how deep I’ll go with coding, but for now, I’ll keep building — and mapping what I learn as I go. If all goes well, I’m hoping to finish the blog by next week.
Skill check: Writing
What Zinsser taught me
✅ Read: On Writing Well by William Zinsser ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🆕 Started: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
It’s been a busy week of reading. I read through William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. A solid book. I enjoyed Zinsser’s concise and to-the-point style. Some of the insights I resonated with:
You are writing for yourself. Don't try to visualise the great mass audience.
Why write? This question weighed on my mind when I started. Part of me admires the prolific online writers who crank out listicles and growth hacks. There’s something impressive about the way they blend storytelling with persuasion—almost like modern copywriters. And I can see how that kind of writing works: it hooks, it spreads, it converts. Honestly, I do want to know “30 Unforgettable Tips From the 10 Most Successful Online Writers.”
But I’m also realising that’s not the path I want to take.
I’m more drawn to writing as reflection—writing to figure out what I think, to clarify what matters, and to record how I’m changing over time. If that means slower growth or fewer clicks, I’m okay with that. It might even be better. I don’t want to be caught in status games or tie my creative work too closely to my income.
Zinsser drives this home again:
You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don't want them anyway.
The long game is the expressing of who you are. Relax and say what you want to say.
Style is who you are, you only need to be true to yourself to find it gradually emerging from under the accumulated clutter and debris, growing more distinctive every day. Perhaps the style won't solidify for years as your style, your voice.
It’s funny how so much advice boils down to the cliché: be yourself. Still, it’s reassuring to hear it from someone with Zinsser’s clarity. Like any creative craft, writing has no fixed rules—only the long process of uncovering your own voice.
Another lesson that hit me: the discipline of subtraction.
In a previous life I was a consultant. And I wrote like one—dense, bloated, full of business jargon. It’s embarrassing now, especially since I’ve always appreciated minimalist design. Zinsser made me realise that writing and design follow the same principle:
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
Or as legendary designer, Dieter Rams put it: Less, but better.
Finally, one last insight I loved: good writing starts with paying attention. Even the most mundane topic can come alive if you find the human thread inside it.
You'll find the solution if you look for the human element. Somewhere in every drab institution are men and women who have a fierce attachment to what they are doing and are rich repositories of lore. Somewhere behind every storm sewer is a politician whose future hangs on getting it installed and a widow who has always lived on the block and is outraged that some damn-fool legislator thinks it will wash away. Find these people to tell your story and it won't be drab. I've proved this to myself often.
Zissner’s golden rules (so far):
Write for yourself first
Strip every sentence to its cleanest form
Pay attention to the human element
Reflections on what I wrote
✅ Published 3/2 - 2 article and 1 newsletter
🖋️ When Momentum Breaks
Practice goal: personal narrative using ideas from On Writing Well
I’ve started reading Stephen King’s On Writing, and I loved how he tells short, self-contained childhood stories—usually light, with a small dramatic twist and takeaway.
I wanted to try something similar: a short narrative based on a recent event. More journal entry than memoir. The goal was to write something personal without overdramatising. It didn’t end up being funny or deep, but I’m happy with this piece as the observations, feelings and reflections didn’t feel exaggerated.
After revising it a few times, I asked ChatGPT to critique it “as a masterful writer.” Some feedback was helpful, but I noticed it pushed for more emotional punch. For example:
“I’d built my identity around not needing anyone. Crutches broke more than my stride. They cracked the image of someone self-sufficient. And that hurt more than the fall.”
It’s a powerful line, but not my voice or the way I think. That’s where AI needs filtering—style is personal. More isn’t always better. Zinsser warns against overstatement:
“The living room looked as if an atomic bomb had gone off there,” writes the novice writer, describing what he saw on Sunday morning after a party that got out of hand. Well, we all know he’s exaggerating to make a droll point.
This was a useful point to consider. In the past, I remember trying to inflate the excitement of an everyday event, but in reality it’s putting lipstick on the pig. I’d rather stay closer to an understatement—because that’s how the moment actually felt.
One critique I could agree with was that the climbing section dragged a little. That too much explanation can break the emotional rhythm. I did make it this way on purpose, attempting to apply Zinsser’s idea of technical writing:
Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you.
I love that kind of writing—where the steps themselves become story. Zinsser cites an example about a chimp playing tic-tac-toe that breaks down complex research on how our cognition works. It also reminded me of Chuck Palahniuk, who sometimes builds whole chapters around process (like making soap in Fight Club). That “side note” style is something I want to explore more, for now I cut it down a little shorter.
This piece was hard to start, but surprisingly enjoyable to write once I got into the flow. That alone feels like a huge win.
🖋️ Collector’s Fallacy
Practice goal: weave personal experience into an advice/how-to piece
I was having trouble thinking about what to write about, but the “Collector’s Fallacy” kept resurfacing—a narrow, niche idea, but one I’ve personally dealt with. This was my attempt to turn that into something useful.
In writing this piece, I’d been reflecting deeply on David Perell’s personal note about writing in the age of AI:
What kinds of non-fiction writing will continue to last? Here’s a heuristic: The more a piece of writing comes from personal experience, the less it’s likely to be overtaken by AI. Personal writing, like biographies and memoirs, aren’t going away anytime soon. That's because people have data about their lives that LLMs don’t have.
That resonated. I didn’t want to just repackage common advice—we’re drowning in that already. I wanted the piece to feel lived-in, grounded in my own experience.
Writing this kind of piece, the biggest challenge was balancing three things:
Usefulness – Ensuring the advice is based on my own experience. Synthesising down into the idea of 3 main traps, when I could’ve easily explored another 10. Ensuring they land with some practical advice.
Engagement - Keeping the reader’s attention without being overdramatic. Making PKM interesting without forcing jokes or drama.
Conciseness: The draft was already over 2000 words and I cut it to 1300, but it took a lot of effort.
Editing took 2–3 times longer than writing this—something I will need to work on. I’m happy with where it landed, even though I can already see spots I’d tweak. But for now, I’m calling it done. Sometimes you just have to get it out.
Three more golden rules from Zissner:
Style = identity
Explaining how it works forces clarity
Avoid overstatement
Books I read this week
Each week, I’ll list the books I’ve read — they’re fuel for this learning process.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (3.5⭐)
Classic Ishiguro—quietly haunting, emotionally restrained. The familiar formula is there, but the payoff didn’t hit as hard as some of his other works. Still, a beautifully written and thoughtful read.
DOSE by TJ Powers (2⭐)
I read this for a book club. It’s not bad—just very introductory. It’s like a gateway to the Huberman-style self-optimisation world. If you’ve already dipped your toes in that space, you’re better off going straight to the source material.
On Writing Well by William Zissner (4.5⭐)
A foundational book for nonfiction writers. Zinsser’s advice is clear, practical, and surprisingly timeless. Some of the example essays drag a bit, so just skip those, but the core lessons on clarity, simplicity, and voice are useful.
Coming Up Next
Finish and launch the blog
Read On Writing by Stephen King, The Elements of Style by Strunk & White
Review my Write of Passage notes
Build my first attempt at a Writing Field Guide
Are you exploring AI, writing, or both? If anything here sparked something, I’d love to know what you’re working on.