A year of coding by talking: what I gained and what I lost

2024 was the year AI was everywhere. The ads, the praise, the feeling that something had already been decided without me. I am in my fifties. I had to decide whether to watch or take part. I decided to take part. I started with VS Code, on a paid plan. I did not have to think about what to build. Something had been sitting in my head for years: an automated trading system. I have lived fifty years, and while raising children the money got tighter, not looser. Financial freedom was moving away from me, not toward me. So I wanted to make money with automated trading. I think the idea first arrived in my mid-forties. That is why the decision to take part came so quickly. Whatever I said out loud would simply get built. That was the hope I walked in on. I do not really know how to code. But the AI would handle that part, so I trusted it. Where the illusion first cracked A year inside VS Code taught me that two names mattered: GPT and Claude. I used them in turn. I used them one at a time. Two problems. First, even on a paid plan the usage ran out fast. Faster than I expected. The road ahead was long and I was sitting still, waiting for a quota to reset. The second one was worse. The explanations were excellent. The results were not. That is where the illusion cracked for the first time. I still could not let go, so I paid for more. Adding Cursor bought me some headroom. And a different problem showed up immediately. Switch the model and it wants to start over Change the model, and it wants to rewrite everything from the beginning. Handed code written by a different AI, it would rather replace the whole thing than edit it. That is when I understood that switching AI mid-project is a bad idea. Everyone talks about pricing. Almost nobody talks about this one. And this is the one that actually held me back. I spent a lot of time fighting the tool. In the end I paid for Claude's hundred-dollar plan, and from then on I worked with Claude. What I gained: the job nobody wanted