In 2022 I built a web tool that calculates compensation for unused vacation days. Nothing flashy, just a boring HR problem with real users, mostly people in Uzbekistan who needed a fast answer to a very specific question. The tool is still online: https://codepen.io/Bludarkwhite/pen/PoRZpJq
I'm not posting this because the product is impressive. I'm posting it because of the way I built it.
At the time I was already treating GPT differently from how most people around me were using it — not as a chatbot to ask questions to, but as an active partner in building software. I'd describe what I wanted, read what came back, run it, figure out what broke, then go back and refine the prompt. The whole process felt new, less like writing code and more like having a technical conversation about what the code should be.
Nobody had a name for this in 2022. No "vibe coding," no "agents," no "AI-assisted development." Most people I tried to explain it to didn't really get what I was describing. From the outside it probably just looked like I was chatting with a bot.
But working inside that loop, I could already see where this was heading. The bottleneck in software development was shifting away from syntax and toward something harder to teach: knowing clearly what you want to build and being able to say it precisely.
I'm a full-stack developer now, and I still work the same way. That vacation calculator was one of the first things I shipped through this workflow, and it taught me more about AI-assisted development than any tutorial I came across later. Three years on, half the industry builds like this and is still arguing about what to call it.
I don't claim I was the first. I was just early enough to remember when none of this had a name yet.