How to Learn App Building with AI in Just 10 Minutes a Day

Chris Davis 0:09
And we’re back. Welcome to another episode of the All Systems Go podcast. Listen. I want to.

Chris Davis 0:17
I want to be honest. And my hope is that my honesty is encouraging and enabling for you. And apropos to many of these episodes, I like to start with a story. And this story is how I first attempted to learn AI and why today’s episode or this episode is going to be so important for you.

Chris Davis 0:43
Because I’m going to show you exactly what I did and it is not hard. It does take discipline. So let me start in the beginning. I am, I’m not going to name drop because I want to protect the identity of these individuals.

Chris Davis 1:02
So my first experience was I was on a webinar inside of a community that I respect the community owners of. And this individual was teaching on AI. And this was way back before custom GPTs, which wasn’t but like a year ago. Isn’t that crazy that we can say way back it was like a year ago?

Chris Davis 1:23
Just think, a year ago, custom GPTs were like revolution. Now I can’t think of anybody who’s excited over a custom gbt. Most people are getting excited over MCP and ability to build apps and SaaS platforms and all of that. It’s bananas how fast things change and have been evolving and will continue to evolve.

Chris Davis 1:46
Well, anyways, at this time, at this time of AI, it was so fresh that many people, if you were using it to proofread, you know, your, your emails before you sent it, or if you were asking it about I a strategy for posting on social media and doing it, you were, you were the cream of the crop. There were no agents that were actually going out doing stuff. There was nothing through MCP where they can interact with the API on your behalf. None of that stuff existed.

Chris Davis 2:20
Right. Claw code was known only by like the most techie of technical folks. So I attended this webinar and at that time I was very anti AI. I’m just like, here you guys go, robots.

Chris Davis 2:37
After a career of telling me I don’t want to sound like a robot in my business. And that’s why I don’t automate everything, even things that you should be automating. Years of people telling me this, now all of a sudden AI makes it okay. I not willing and ready to accept that I was in my feelings, however, wasn’t that I wasn’t so much in my feelings that I was foolish.

Chris Davis 3:04
Okay, so I attended this webinar and this individual gave an amazing presentation and put out a course. Hey, learn how to do it. Buy my course, purchased a course, got in it. Trash, Absolute trash.

Chris Davis 3:22
It was like the most basic stuff. It didn’t give me an understanding of how to prompt, context, window, context, rot, do, start, do. I keep one large chat, switch chats. It just gave me a whole bunch of surface.

Chris Davis 3:39
Do this, then do this. Sign up for this tool. Oh, it was disgusting, right? So I was frustrated and what I did is I used that frustration to validate C A I.

Chris Davis 3:48
Stupid, right? However, again, my frustration didn’t lead me to foolishness and I was still open minded. So then I found these YouTube videos and one, one person in particular was an electrical engineer, which for many of you, that if you don’t know by formal trade, I’m an electrical engineer. That’s how I started my career at Lockheed Martin.

Chris Davis 4:08
So anytime a engineer has something to say, I listen. So I’m following, you know, these videos and I’m starting to say, hmm, let me try it. He’s like, hey, this is how you prompt and da, da, da, da, da. So I said, let me try that.

Chris Davis 4:21
Try it out. Garbage. Trash. Output was absolutely.

Chris Davis 4:25
Not only was the output terrible, it took me more time to get a terrible output because I’m trying to use his prompts and then I’m running out of tokens. At this time, I’m $20 a month. Everybody on ChatGPT trying to figure out, do I want to pay 20 for Cloud 2, that’s $40 a month for AI, that’s too much. What?

Chris Davis 4:46
This is crazy. Like now I gladly pay whatever. I pay a hundred dollars a month, whatever for AI, because how I’m using it. But this was back then and I started to get frustrating because there started to be this language of people, hey, you could do this, you could do that.

Chris Davis 5:02
It wasn’t fomo, everybody. It wasn’t FOMO that was kicking in. It was, why can I not understand this thing? Can it be that complex?

Chris Davis 5:13
So this is the decision that I made and this is why this episode is important. I told myself every day I was gonna take 10 minutes and learn something new about AI that I didn’t know that was it, everybody. And what did that look like? That looked like maybe I’m watching a game, a basketball game, commercial break, halftime, maybe even just a boring string of back and forth where nobody’s really scoring.

Chris Davis 5:40
And I’ll have an idea and I say, hey, ChatGPT at the time was my primary AI. I was like, hey, how Do I do X right? What. What does this mean?

Chris Davis 5:52
Break it down in human. In plain English. Give me an analogy. I would start to have these conversations, and I would just limit it to 10 minutes a day.

Chris Davis 6:01
That’s it. That’s all I would do. And what happened was, it’s the law of compound interest. I call it the law of compound understanding.

Chris Davis 6:11
You make these deposits every day, and at some point you hit an inflection point and understanding comes like a fl. You’re like, wait a minute. And that’s what happened. One day I looked up, I said, wait a minute.

Chris Davis 6:22
I think I understand AI it sounds crazy as I’m saying it to you in this way, but it hit me. I was like, wait, I think I figured this out. Let me go try it. So then I started to try to build my first application, which might have been a WordPress plugin.

Chris Davis 6:40
And let me tell you, I don’t even want to go look at that. At that chat thread. I know, I know. I was burning tokens so fast, everybody, because one of the things was every time I made a change, I told it to rebuild the entire code base.

Chris Davis 6:59
What? Oh, my goodness. All I could do is laugh at myself. So anyways, after just doing 10 minutes a day, you get, you know, hey, I’m going to learn this.

Chris Davis 7:10
I’m set a time. I’m not going to. You know, if it was one of those moments where I was like, you know what? I am going to do more than 10 minutes, so be it.

Chris Davis 7:18
But 10 minutes was my only requirement. Then I got to my inflection point where I had deeper understanding. Now I’m practicing. Now, in practice, I’m running into all types of problems.

Chris Davis 7:28
Problems now feed me more prompts. Back to AI Why is it doing this? What’s the best way to do this? Do you see what I’m saying?

Chris Davis 7:36
So before you know it, I learned. And in this process, I learned AI is a lot better. Back then, hallucination was at its peak. I mean, probably 80% of what AI would give us was a hallucinated result.

Chris Davis 7:55
So I’m also learning, oh, okay. There’s certain things that you can’t trust it. And I started. I think I mentioned this in another episode.

Chris Davis 8:03
I started asking it questions I already knew the answer to to see where the hallucination took place. What am I telling you? I use 10 minutes a day to start to learn how to talk to these robots. That’s how I built a relationship with robots.

Chris Davis 8:22
Learning how they thought, learning how they process. And though every model does things differently and more efficiently and all of that. The foundational approach to AI has remained unchanged. It’s just the methodologies are getting easier or, you know, different.

Chris Davis 8:40
But it needs context, it needs a good prompt and it need, and it needs something to run its output against to see if it’s right. Now, how you do that, hey, I’ve seen people do iterative cycles where the agent keeps comparing it to itself until it fit, until it gets the perfect result. I’ve seen people use humans, hey, this isn’t right. This is more of me.

Chris Davis 9:03
This isn’t right. This is why using markup, you know, uploading images, whatever the case may be, the practice will change, but the foundation of how, the fundamentals of how you interact with robots is unchanged. So that was the beginning, right? So most people, what I found and what was holding me up is most people think that they have to set aside this time almost like a class, like a course, like a certification.

Chris Davis 9:34
That’s what they think. They have to set aside this time to dedicate to AI, to learning AI. And if you think like that and you’re already busy, you’ll never do it. And what will happen, FOMO will start kicking in and then you’ll start joining these courses and communities looking for a shortcut.

Chris Davis 9:53
Because now you let FOMO kick in, which you’re still ahead of the curve, by the way. You’re not left out. You let FOMO kick in. Now you’re joining these surface level communities that are teaching you how to do things, but you don’t understand how it’s working so that you can break free at times from what they say and do it the way that you want to do it.

Chris Davis 10:13
Right? So, so that’s not, that’s, that’s the approach that I took. That’s not the approach that I want you to take. Right?

Chris Davis 10:27
And I found this out not only in practice, but also when I started to teach, when I created my first course on how to. I thought I was creating a course on how to build apps. I was not. I was really creating a course on how to build your app building foundation so that you can build unlimited apps.

Chris Davis 10:48
That’s really it. Because once you have that foundation, you, you’re off to the races. Well, guess what? That’s exactly what I said.

Chris Davis 10:55
I was like, in one day, which essentially is hours, right? In one day you can do this, this and that. And in the process of this, all I learned that it’s one. It’s too much to try to learn it one day.

Chris Davis 11:08
It’s just way too much. So I align and I agree with all of you who are just like, I’m already overwhelmed. It’s just another thing. I agree.

Chris Davis 11:18
And then once people actually went through it and I reflected and say, how would I do this differently? I would recommend that you choose 10 minutes a day to do something. It’s easy. If you have a course like I have a course that helps you build that foundational app building setup, get that set up in place.

Chris Davis 11:41
And every lesson now in there is intentionally less than 10 minutes. So you don’t even have to think. You just go in there, say, okay, today, lesson one. Got it.

Chris Davis 11:51
And that may be the hardest part is just allowing 10 minutes or less to be success. Move. Move the goalposts from I have to learn how to do a thing to I just learned something. Right.

Chris Davis 12:08
I need. You’re not. I need to learn how to do this entire thing anymore. Your let me learn something.

Chris Davis 12:18
And that mind shift, that growth hack we’ll call it or that. Let me say that that learning hack we’ll call it is what’s going to help you move faster than you’ve ever imagined. And, and the reason why I say this is because that inflection point that I told you I hit, that inflection point was understanding how to build apps. And it is, it is my firm belief app building is the best practice you can have.

Chris Davis 12:50
It’s the best practice. Now, in 10 minutes, I can prompt in a way. If you give me 10 minutes to write a solid prompt, I can almost one shot, an apple. I’m gonna write that prompt, give it all the context, whatever it needs, upload, tell it to go build.

Chris Davis 13:11
And I’m, I’m in a meeting somewhere. I’m. I’m off dropping my son off at basketball practice or, you know, whatever, coming back to a very functional prototype that I can then look at and in two minutes say, hey, change this, do this, do that, boom. I not in one setting, but over the span of multiple 10 to 30 minute settings, I can get an entire app built throughout the day with no interruption of my regular day flow.

Chris Davis 13:39
I’m still attending the meetings, I’m still present at my son’s game. I’m not prompting on my phone instead of watching my son’s game. No, but guess what? You all know when you’re driving and you hit that long stoplight and you’re like, dang it, dang it.

Chris Davis 13:56
You’re tempted to run it because you know it’s broken. You may be there for another two to Three minutes. Well, guess what? I don’t mind waiting anymore.

Chris Davis 14:04
I have in part of this framework, you’re able to do it. You’re able to resume your sessions on your computer from your mobile phone. So resume a session, hit that button, speak what I need done, hit enter, let it work. Sometimes I like watching the app get built while I’m at a red light.

Chris Davis 14:21
Call me crazy. Makes it easy waiting. And by the time I get home, I got something much more polished, you know, to look at. But my point is, this habit, this practice of just 10 minutes a day is going to serve you so well.

Chris Davis 14:38
And it is the primary thing that’s going to prevent you from actually learning AI right now while you’re busy. Because guess what? Spoiler alert. You’re not going to get less busy.

Chris Davis 14:58
Life. The older you get, life just stacks on more. It doesn’t remove as you get older, there’s just more to do. You’re never not going to be busy.

Chris Davis 15:09
You’re never not going to have something to do while having five other things to do. It’s not. You’re not looking to not be busy. You’re looking to manage your busy better and understand how to grow while being busy.

Chris Davis 15:27
People who are always overwhelmed. I got so much going on, but when I get some time, I’m going to go into your course. I’m like, you’re looking at it all wrong. No, that’s not the case.

Chris Davis 15:36
You might as well just say, I’m never going to log in. What I’m saying is, set aside the 10 minutes. It could be terminology. There’s so much terminology.

Chris Davis 15:47
Hey, Chat. What is a pwa? I keep hearing people talk about a pwa. What is it?

Chris Davis 15:53
What does it mean? Oh, progressive web app. Oh, it’s an alternative to get an app on your phone instead of going through the Google Play and App Store. Oh, great.

Chris Davis 16:01
Well, how are some ways that I can do this right? You’re just being curious. And I promise you, because the bar is so low. 10 minutes waiting for your doctor’s appointment.

Chris Davis 16:14
10 minutes waiting on your spouse getting ready. 10 minutes here, it’s there. 10 minutes is all throughout your day. And if you use it correctly, you’ll be able to really, you’ll be able to hit your inflection point a lot sooner.

Chris Davis 16:32
Right? So my whole. My, my. The whole what I want, what I want to communicate in this podcast is don’t wait for.

Chris Davis 16:44
Don’t wait for work to stop, for you to learn. Learn while you work. Learn while you work. And the best way is of course, contextual.

Chris Davis 16:56
So you don’t have to be in the tech industry. You can be anyone. You could be in the finance industry, you could be in the retail industry. And maybe you’re trying to figure out percentages or you’re trying to figure out if this is a better deal than other deals or you’re looking for, you’re trying to.

Chris Davis 17:23
You have a specific question around finances that you’ve been meaning to ask your cpa. Whatever the case is, what I’m saying is use that as time to engage with the robot and assess how it’s answering. The answer itself is not what I care about more than you. Prompting to get an answer and then looking at the answering, knowing what to do with it, even when you get an answer, that’s terrible.

Chris Davis 17:56
Knowing that the answer is terrible is going to go a long way. Right? So many of you, I just realized, as I said, that many of you are doing that. So let me modify what I just said, because that’s not really what I want you to do.

Chris Davis 18:10
I don’t want you to just be prompting it for things of every day. Right? I want you to be prompting it specifically. Let me get clear here, because I don’t want to send mixed signals because the only way that you’re going to reach that inflection point is understanding how AI works.

Chris Davis 18:29
And my preference is app building. So 10 minutes a day, if you have my course, go through that first. That actually solves a lot for you. I just answered it for you.

Chris Davis 18:41
Go through that course. But if not, ask questions around app building. If you don’t know where to start, just ask what type of apps can you build? And it’ll tell you.

Chris Davis 18:55
And I guarantee you you’re not going to understand some of the language because AI continually talks to me. So, so smart. So much tech jargon. I feel dumb.

Chris Davis 19:08
And I am very tech savvy. I have to tell her, hey, look, talk to me like a kindergartner here. But I cannot tell you how many things I have learned. Again, I didn’t know what a PWA was.

Chris Davis 19:21
I didn’t know what a progressive web app was. Didn’t know how they, how they’re installed. I didn’t know the limitations. I asked AI once, was what, what are, what are the primary reasons somebody would choose a PWA over going with the app that’s in the, in the Google Play or Apple store?

Chris Davis 19:40
Just curious. 10 minutes. Learn something new. Learn about push notifications, learn about branding, learned about how apps are updated, learned about maintenance and upkeep.

Chris Davis 19:50
All of that. Want another one? Hey, what database back end should I be using for apps that I will potentially build? You’re gonna learn so postgres, you’re gonna learn about all types of software that you didn’t know.

Chris Davis 20:07
Rate limiting, what is that? What is rate limiting? Take some of the terms you’ve heard on this podcast. What is mcp?

Chris Davis 20:16
What does that mean? What is an API? These are all. Listen, if you just ask the questions that I just gave you on this podcast, it would open up more questions for you to ask.

Chris Davis 20:29
And Again, these are 10 minutes a day. Just learn these things. And then before you know it, you’re looking at your spreadsheet and you’re not even thinking about it. You’re like, okay, let me download this as a CSV, let me upload it to the chat, tell it to look at my data set and build an application that allows me to visualize the this information in the best way possible.

Chris Davis 20:54
And actually let me take a screenshot of how I’m currently populating charts in the Google Sheet and tell it I want it to improve this. You do that and then you get your first dashboard. And then, my friends, you’re hooked. Now what I just told you is 10 minutes, by the way.

Chris Davis 21:12
Go into a spreadsheet that you already have, download it as a CSV, put it into claw, put it in chatgpt, say, hey, look, review this data. I want you to make a dashboard that presents it in a way that’s visually easy for me to understand the performance, take a screenshot of your current dashboard or whatever. If you don’t have one, guess what step, one less step, just hit Enter. But if you have Excel formulas that create charts and all that, take a picture of the charts, put it in there, or go online and say, hey, I want charts that look like this.

Chris Davis 21:45
Take a snapshot, put it in the chat, that’s 10 minutes, hit enter and leave. Go to your next meeting, go get something to eat, come back to a gift, and it’s that easy. This is why I’m saying 10 minutes a day of learning turns into 10 minutes a day of practice. And then from there it turns into unlimited practice.

Chris Davis 22:08
There are some days where I’m up late and I know I should be asleep, but I’m on a roll, everyone. You don’t start out like that. You don’t start out like that. So my thing is 10 minutes a day focused on building an app, focused on building an app, but learning about all the elements of app building, you will learn so much I’m telling you, a good part of what they call Vibe coding is learning the terminology.

Chris Davis 22:38
What does hydration mean? When AI says we’re gonna. It was a hydrated response. It’s like, what, water?

Chris Davis 22:45
Where. What’s going on? Right. Would you like for me to fold this into your current design?

Chris Davis 22:53
I didn’t Even know what GitHub was. Everyone. Can I be honest? I didn’t know what GitHub was.

Chris Davis 22:58
It was a 10 minute session. What is GitHub and why should I use it? Why do people use it? I learned what, what is a repository?

Chris Davis 23:06
Why do you need them? Can you share them? What if I delete a repository? If I do share it, is the code open source?

Chris Davis 23:12
What is it? So many questions, everybody. But it was a contextual to app building. So when I started the practice of building an app, it all started to come together.

Chris Davis 23:22
I’m not just asking to ask again. I’m trying to guide your, your purpose. And the output is building an app. Because I believe building apps are the fastest way to learn the capabilities of AI.

Chris Davis 23:37
And they don’t have to be big apps, just any app. It could be a Chrome plugin, could be a WordPress plugin, it could be just a small website that does something basic. At the time of recording, I just turned one of my son’s Google Docs into a daily, daily, daily checklist for taking care of his dog. It’s five people in the house.

Chris Davis 24:02
He’s. Sometimes he’s at work, it’s like, hey, who’s doing what to make sure the dog gets the care that he needs. Simple. Well, I’m not, I’m.

Chris Davis 24:10
I’m not going to sell. Has a finite purpose. And when I’m done with it, I’m done with it. But what did I, but what did I learn?

Chris Davis 24:19
I learned that much more on how to prompt and how, how to talk to these robots in a way to get a result faster than I realized was possible. And useful at that. The skill, this skill everybody is. It’s just one that you cannot afford going without.

Chris Davis 24:41
There’s no other way. I’ve got numerous podcasts on personal software. Three apps to start with. Listen, this.

Chris Davis 24:50
I can’t make it more simple than this. 10 minutes a day is all you need. Again, if you have my course and you have not gone through it, just 10 minutes a day per lesson. There’s no lesson greater than 10 minutes.

Chris Davis 25:04
If there is, let me know. I’ll tell you how to break it up. But I’m pretty sure no lesson greater than 10 minutes will get you in the game. I am telling you, there is something about when you build your own app that unlocks possibilities that I cannot even explain.

Chris Davis 25:20
And I just want you all to get in the game. So hopefully this helps. These come from the continual responses I get from people. Oh, Chris, I need to learn this.

Chris Davis 25:29
When I one day I’m just so busy with client work. And if you can’t do it while you’re working, you can’t do it because work is always going to be there. Family stuff. You’re always going to have something.

Chris Davis 25:42
So my thing is use an approach that allows you to do it while you work instead of waiting for work to end or some magical free time. Because usually that magical free time is vacation. And you don’t want to be thinking that hard on vacation. You want to be relaxing.

Chris Davis 25:57
So do it within your workflow to improve your workflow. All right, with that being said, thank you all for listening as always. As always, thank you all for subscribing. Thank you for all of the comments on my posts, wherever I post, because I’m posting all over the place now.

Chris Davis 26:13
Thank you for following, thank you for liking, thank you for the dms, thank you for joining the community. Thank you for the questions in the community. Thank you for showing up to office hours, everybody. Thank you.

Chris Davis 26:23
Thank you. I do this for you to get better. And all I know is when you show up, you get better. So my gift, your gift to me is you getting better.

Chris Davis 26:34
All right. So continue to support the podcast. Share those of you senior builders that want to take what you’ve learned and what you can do and optimize that, come join the community. Links are in the description of the podcast.

Chris Davis 26:50
Until next time I see you all online. Automate responsibly, my friends.