I started out as a photo editor at the NBA. That was my first real job. I've always had an eye for how things should look, and that part never went away. The thing I was actually doing just kept changing.
After that I spent about ten years in design. Brand work, motion, marketing, a lot of web stuff. My title was always "designer." But on the web jobs I was usually building the front end too. The markup, the styling, the WordPress builds. So I've had a foot in the code for a long time. I just never built a whole thing on my own. The back end always went to someone else.
Then AI showed up and started doing a lot of what I did. I won't pretend that wasn't scary. But the scary part wasn't really the AI. It was not knowing if I could even go this route. Everything I'd be learning was completely new to me, and I had no idea if I'd actually understand it, or if I could really make apps. I just had to see if I could. So instead of sitting still, I tried.
Step one was learning React. (I wrote about that here.) That was me going from styling pages to actually building real apps.
But the bigger thing was figuring out how good AI is at code. Like, really good. I figured if it's that good, I should learn to build with it instead of trying to compete with it. So that's what I did. And it changed what I was able to make. It handled the back end I'd never touched. It sped everything up. It let me push way past what I could do on my own.
That's how I got here. The stuff I've built since, like MyEBikeLaw, IsoRide, and GamerStats, is designed and built by me, on my own, back end and all. A few years ago I couldn't have done that. Now I can.
So when I say I'm an AI-native design engineer, I don't mean it as a buzzword. It's just how I actually got here. I'm a designer who was always a little bit of a builder, and AI is what let me become the whole thing.
The old work isn't gone either. It's the foundation. The eye I built editing photos and designing for ten years is the reason any of this looks the way it does. I just have more tools now.
The design years
Ten years of this before I wrote a line of React. The foundation.