They have learned how to make garbage.

Well, first off I learned that I should never share this ever again on Lemmy. I naively thought that what has actually been a lot of work was possibly be worth 30 seconds of fun to someone somewhere...nope. Literally nothing but hate here. I've had much less harsh and generally not-negative comments elsewhere, and as a lemmy user on another instance, it was pretty surprising.

As for coding, I've learned quite a bit about using Claude Code in VS studio, which is something that I hadn't touched a couple months ago. My coding experience prior to this was being a Linux user, some stats program stuff, and some light HTML, so it's been a lot of learning about javascript and CSS. I also learned that now it's a pretty short line between an idea and getting something coded that actually works. So if I want to mock-up a site or app or browser extension just for me, that's not hard to do.

I also learned just how much charlatanism there is in the AI/coding space. Even just for gaming or just for small sub-sets of use. Tons of people are trying to be one rung up the ladder and sell subscriptions to some AI system that does it all - trying to follow the adage to sell shovels during a gold rush, not dig for gold. So it's very easy to just get consumed by $20 a month subscriptions to 200 things promising everything and anything. Though, it doesn't seem like many people are going for those things, at least not enough to keep all these people afloat long term.

There's also a ton of people out there trying to do the same thing. Once a week someone on reddit posts their site where they want to be some hub for community and resources, and every time no one wants to jump on board. I'm not a coder, I'm an economic analyst - so it gave me great insight into the part of the AI bubble that might actually pop first. AI infrastructure investment and sunk costs (oh, those are "investments!") by larger companies will keep a lot of bigger entities going, so the bubble that affects normal people and small businesses is where the real danger is for large-scale shifts in the economy.

So the real lessons learned were about the non-friends I made along the way.