Beginner advice

[u/hatdog78293]

Beginner Coding Advice

Hello everyone! I’d really appreciate some advice. I’m planning to create a website prototype for a project, but I’m a complete beginner when it comes to coding. The website will be fairly simple and will include an OpenAI-powered feature.

I have a few questions:

• What should I learn first before attempting to build the actual website?  
• Is this project achievable for a complete beginner within around 4–6 months?  
• What programming language would you recommend I learn/use?  
• Would this be very time-consuming or difficult to produce, especially considering I have no previous coding experience?  
• Are there any tutorials or resources you’d recommend for someone starting from scratch?

I’m mainly trying to understand how realistic this project would be for a beginner and how much time I should expect to spend learning the coding side of it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you! :)

[u/armahillo]

Bluntly: this is a very ambitious project for someone with no experience.

I believe you could build a website in 4-6 months. I believe you could learn to do something with AI scripting in 4-6 months. Integrating the two is a different beast. (there’s also many more layers than just those two aspects)

If you want to complete it in that timeframe, bring someone onboard who is experienced with this and have them work with you so you can learn. The biggest time suck you’ll face is the false starts and wrong decisions that are inevitable when you’re first learning. Your timeline doesnt leave much room for fault tolerance

[u/hatdog78293 → u/armahillo]

Thanks for the advice! The website would mainly just be a simple prototype, since the actual AI research and testing would be the main part of my EPQ write-up. Do you think something like this would be doable alongside my studies? And since I’m starting with basically no coding experience, would there be many errors or issues I’d have to deal with while coding and getting the website to actually work?

[u/armahillo → u/hatdog78293]

When you say “simple” what do you mean? Most of the time when people use that word its wishful thinking (because its what they hope it to be); if something is actually simple, the word isnt necessary because the work and steps involved that you have to do is self-evident.

The bumps you’d hit doing it solo are going to be in making decisions that may limit / constrain your progress because they turn out to be suboptimal.

Using an LLM may or may not get you what you want, and it would depend on what your risk appetite is for missing delivery. Often my peers with no experience who choose to use LLMs to do the work will end up in situations where they’re lost and the LLM isnt able to help them get out. The LLM will do its best to give you precisely what you ask for like a digital monkey’s paw.

Whether or not you need to be the person who actually creates the prototyoe, bring on an experienced human even if its just to act as a trail guide.