Building an AI Agent in 6 Weeks (and Finally Understanding How They Work)

Jeff Haemer has written software since he was teaching it at the University of Colorado in the early 1980s. But he felt he needed to brush up his Python, and above all get a grounding in AI.

In his words AI was "a big undifferentiated cloud of things I didn't know." Time to change that.

"Rust Is for People Who Want to Be Punished." Now Jochen Trusts It More Than Python.

Jochen Deister is a lawyer who codes for fun. He has years of Python behind him and no intention of ever being hired to program.

Three months ago, Rust was just a name to him, the language for "the big shots" with a notoriously steep learning curve. Then he built a JSON parser from scratch in Rust, and it ran faster than the equivalent in Python on every dataset he tested, up to 3.5x faster on some. "Holy F" he reacted when he saw the results.

Learning a New Programming Language Is More Important Now, Not Less

Josh Engroff has been writing Python for years and runs agentic AI workflows every day. He bought the Rust book a year and a half ago, did some online exercises, stalled.

Six weeks into the cohort, his hand-rolled JSON parser beat CPython's stdlib json module on every fixture in his benchmark suite, including three real-world files from the simdjson and serde-json corpora. Here is how he did it.

From Python Script to Production: A Django Coaching Case Study

Six weeks of 1:1 coaching. The output: a Django app in production on Fly.io, covering movies, anime, and manga, with user accounts, a save library, Docker, and CI/CD on every push. Daniele started with Python skills and a project idea. Here's what the work actually looked like.

Mind Map Your App Before You Write a Line of Code

A new project starts as a complete picture in your head. Then you open an editor and realize you have no idea what to do first. That gap is where projects stall.

Python to Rust: A JSON Parser in 6 Weeks

Vikas Zingade is a lead ML engineer who builds complex systems in Python every day. He'd read about Rust, understanding it in theory, but he'd never actually had the borrow checker accept his code.

Six weeks and six PRs later, he has a fully compliant JSON parser with 210 passing tests that runs 12x faster than simplejson. His confidence in starting a new Rust project from scratch is a solid 7 out of 10.

Vibe Coding is Easy, Owning the Architecture Isn't

These days you can prompt Claude to generate a working feature in twenty minutes. File uploads, database queries, API calls; the code appears, it runs, it looks right. But if you've never owned a mature architecture, AI-generated code becomes a liability you don't know how to manage.

From Hobby Code to SaaS to Orchestrating AI Agents

Ryan Austin runs a payroll SaaS solution in the Bahamas. He uses AI agents for customer support triage, feature scaffolding, and automated issue resolution. He has even implemented a rating system for issues, allowing agents to autonomously tackle specific tasks based on my available token budget.

Four years ago, none of this would have been possible.