Stop Scrolling. Start Building: My AI Journey From Curious to Creator !
It was early April 2026, and I was sitting at my desk – someone who has never written a single line of code in her life — and I had just built myself a working retirement drawdown calculator. Not downloaded one. Not paid someone to make one. Built one. From scratch. Using nothing but plain English conversation with an Claude Code. I sat there for a minute just staring at it. Then I thought about all the years I had told myself that tech stuff was for other people — for the engineers, the developers, the twenty-something coders in hoodies. And in that quiet moment, something shifted. I realized that the world had changed while most of us were busy scrolling.
This article is my personal progress tracker. A record of what I have witnessed, what I have played with, and why I believe — genuinely and without exaggeration — that we are living through one of the most interesting chapters in human history. And the reason I am documenting this is connected to everything WealthVeda stands for: financial independence, building something of your own, and refusing to let life just happen to you.
What I Tried, What Failed, and What Changed Everything
The best way I can show you how fast this has moved is to walk you through my own experiments — the clumsy early attempts and the moments that made my jaw drop. Here is my honest before-and-after list, from late 2022 to early 2026:
1. Image generation from prompts. In 2023, I spent three to four hours trying to generate one specific image from a text prompt. The results were distorted, wrong, and deeply frustrating. By late 2025, a single clear prompt gave me a beautiful, accurate image in two to five minutes of light editing.
2. Removing a background from a photo. I tried to clean up my husband’s headshot in 2023. It required Photoshop skills I did not have, and I gave up. Today, any AI image tool does this in seconds, effortlessly, for free.
3. Writing and formatting blog articles. Early ChatGPT drafts in late 2022 were generic, repetitive, and needed hours of editing. By 2024 to 2025, the writing quality had improved so dramatically that articles came out nearly ready to publish, matching tone, style, and structure.
4. Building financial tools without coding. In early 2026, I built a retirement drawdown calculator, a compound interest calculator, and a personal family income and expense tracker — all through plain English conversations with AI. No developer. No code knowledge. Just clear thinking and curiosity.
5. Creating a project management tool for myself. Also in early 2026, I built a simple personal project management system for tracking my writing, content, and goals. Again — no technical background required.
6. HeyGen avatar creation. I recorded myself once and created ten to fifteen digital avatar versions of myself. Now I simply write a new script, feed it to my avatar, and a video is produced. I do not need to be on camera every single time. That felt like science fiction the first time I saw it work.
7. Manus AI listening to my video reels. I uploaded an ordinary video I had recorded, and Manus AI listened to what I was saying and suggested and generated matching images to support the content. The accuracy was 99%. One or two prompt tweaks and it was perfect. I genuinely did not expect that to be possible yet.
8. Voice cloning and reuse. I was able to record my own voice, create a clone, and reuse it across content without re-recording everything from scratch. For a content creator with limited time, this is a game-changer.
9. Notebook LM for research and synthesis. I discovered Notebook LM as a way to upload multiple sources and have them synthesized, analyzed, and turned into usable insights. For someone writing a book and managing research across dozens of sources, this felt like having a very organized research assistant.
10. Instagram editing and reel creation. In 2023, editing a reel felt technical and time-consuming. I did not understand B-roll (to be honest, I am still learning — B-roll is simply the supporting footage that plays while your main audio continues, the visual context around your talking head). By 2025 to 2026, editing had become intuitive, captions could be auto-generated, and overlays were no longer a manual battle.
The People Who Helped Me Stay Curious
None of this happened in isolation. Peter Diamandis and his Moonshots podcast gave me the big picture view of exponential change. Mo Gawdat helped me understand the emotional and philosophical arc of where AI is headed — his framing of AI evolving from something like an amoeba to something approaching a PhD-level intelligence was one of the most clarifying mental models I have encountered. Eric Schmidt and Mustafa Suleiman gave me the strategic and geopolitical lens. And Vaibhav Sisinty opened my eyes to what creators and entrepreneurs in India and beyond are building with these tools right now. These voices, taken together, gave me enough map to navigate without getting lost.
Why I Am Doing This — And Why It Connects to Everything
I have also spent the last several years quietly building something on the side — writing articles for WealthVeda, drafting a book on personal finance for my children, creating Instagram reels on index funds and financial independence, and exploring every AI tool I can get my hands on. Not because I am technical. Not because someone told me to. But because I understand, viscerally, what financial independence feels like when it is within reach — and I understand equally what it feels like to realize you wasted years not building toward it.
The internet once did something remarkable for me that no classroom ever did. It taught me about money. Not through a course, not through a professor, but through blogs, books, finance forums where strangers debated index funds with surprising passion, and YouTube videos that explained power of compound interest and the psychology of money. That is how I found the FIRE movement — Financial Independence, Retire Early — and how I began to understand that wealth was not something that happened to lucky people, but something that could be quietly, deliberately built. I taught myself the stock market – the lingo, stock symbols, trading platforms, blue chip companies , tech companies and through trial and error, lost money with confidence, recovered with humility, and eventually found a simple investing philosophy that I have now stuck to for over eight years. The internet gave me that. It democratized knowledge that used to live behind expensive degrees and exclusive dinner tables.
And now, sitting here in 2026, watching what AI is beginning to make possible, I find myself feeling that same electric curiosity all over again — that same hunger I had when I first discovered I could learn anything if I just kept asking the right questions. What the internet did for my financial independence, I genuinely believe AI will do for my creative independence. I just do not yet know exactly what it will build in me. And honestly, that uncertainty feels less like anxiety and more like the most exciting open door I have ever stood in front of.
The internet once surprised me with financial freedom. I have a quiet suspicion that AI is about to surprise me with something even bigger. Pause on that for a moment. Because you might just feel the same electric curiosity stirring in you too.
“You don’t need to understand AI. You just need to be curious enough to play with it.”