Using AI to build isn’t cheating — it’s how building actually gets done now. But there’s a world of difference between someone shipping real apps with AI and someone stuck in a loop of frustration, and the difference is almost never about which tool they picked. It’s about the process.
In this lesson we’ll break down the difference between an AI “harness” and the “model” inside it, reframe the question everyone asks about which one is best, and walk through the actual build loop you’ll use hundreds of times as you work.
- The difference between an AI harness (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and the model inside it (Claude, GPT, Gemini)
- Why “which one is best” is the wrong question to ask
- The build loop: describe, plan, build, review, iterate
- The most important reframe in this course: errors are normal and iteration is the work