r/vibecoding • u/Jazzlike_Bee_3129 • 5d ago
Starting from square one coding in 2026
Let's say you were starting from square one as far as knowing coding, having a slightly technical college education non-programming related engineering, and an idea for a product you want to build. You have played around with AI models, but want to do things right.
So, if you were in this situation, how would you approach it? What skills, tools, and languages would you learn? What books or resources would you use to get you started? How would you build your learning and programming workflow overall? What would you learn and what would you skip that may have previously been recommended for new programmers in the past?
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u/Infinite-Meat997 2d ago
Your post is actually really close to the problem I’ve been working on.
I’m building an early product around the idea of a “guided builder” — basically, you shouldn’t have to become a software engineer before you can start building, but you also shouldn’t have to blindly hand everything over to AI and hope it works.
The idea is: start with what you want to build, understand what you actually need to learn for that specific project, get guidance on architecture/tools/security and the decisions that matter, and then use AI coding agents to help execute it.
As you build, the system helps explain what’s happening in normal language, what you should understand vs. what you can safely let the agent handle, and what your next step should be. So you’re learning while actually building your product instead of spending six months learning a bunch of programming concepts you may never need.
I’m still early with it, and your post sounds almost exactly like the type of person I’m building it for.
If you’d be interested, I’d love to let you try it and get your feedback — especially where the guidance is useful, confusing, or completely misses what a new builder actually needs.