A side project is the fastest way to upskill in the age of AI
Don't miss out on the learning you get from building a real thing.
The one piece of career advice I’m giving everyone right now is to get a side project. AI is changing how software gets made, and the best way to upskill yourself (and your team, if you have one) is to design and build something end-to-end.
In the last nine months I’ve learned more, and at a faster pace, than in any period of my career. That’s because I’ve been building things. I made a web app that helps parents deal with school emails (more on that in a future newsletter). I built Pegs Out, an app that helps you work out if you should hang your laundry out to try today. And I have a second iOS app which will be out in the next few weeks.
Every one of these has taught me more about how software gets made (and how AI will change that) than anything else I’ve done. You can watch videos, listen to podcasts and read articles, but nothing compares to what you learn by making.
The bar is far lower than you think
Most UX people don’t have a portfolio of side projects because they can’t build software on their own. Until recently, the barrier was just too high. You had to know how to code, keep up with all if the new frameworks and find the time to actually do it. So the only designers with side projects tended to be the ones who already had a technical background.
That barrier is broadly gone. You still benefit from having technical fluency, but the idea that you can’t make software unless you know how to code is simply not true anymore.
The time barrier has shrunk too. Building something small used to take weeks of evenings. Now it might take one or two. I built Pegs Out in two weeks, as a busy parent.
The cost is also relatively low: all you really need is a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, about £20 a month. Nearly every web service (GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, etc.) has a generous free tier, and for a side project you don’t need the paid plans. If you want to ship an iOS app, you’ll need to pay Apple’s annual developer fee, but that’s about it. For people in an industry that pays above average, that’s not an insurmountable investment given how much you get back in learning.
Go beyond Lovable and co.
Most UXers dip their toes into making software by trying something like Lovable, Replit or Figma Make. Type in a prompt and out comes a website – magic! You can get quite far with these, but you’ll quickly reach a local maximum of what you can learn.
Tools like Lovable abstract away almost everything that’s happening under the hood. You don’t have to worry about things like version control, but you also don’t learn about them. You get the result without understanding how things are made.
What I’m suggesting goes a step further: use tools like Claude Code, Codex or Cursor to build the real thing and do more of it yourself. When you’re working a little closer to ‘the metal’, then you learn more. Lovable is nothing like how products get built commercially, whereas using Claude Code to build an iOS app is. Tools that do everything for you aren’t going to teach you much.
How to get started
If you’ve never built a digital product, how would you know where to begin? A proper guide is a newsletter in its own right, but the general approach is...
Start with a small idea. Not a side hussle or a business, just a little utility or helper, ideally one that uses an existing free API. Solve a small problem in your own life. This is what Pegs Out is.
Then resist the magical thinking that tools like Lovable encourage. Don’t open Claude and ask it to build the whole thing straight away. That skips a lot of steps which as a UXer, you know matter.
Do your discovery and a bit of design first. When I started on Pegs Out, I got Claude to research the physics of how clothes dry and best practices for building an iOS app, because I had no idea on either. Some people think the ‘double diamond’ is outdated, but I think it’s still worth doing some of that first diamond so you know what you’re building before you start writing code.
When it’s time to build, don’t ask it to just make the whole thing. Ask it how you should make it: I’m not technical, I want to build this, what are my options? What would a developer do here? What does every project need that I don’t know about? It’ll mention something like GitHub, so you ask what GitHub is, and why you need it. That back and forth is where you learn the most. Build it with AI, rather than getting it to do everything for you.
Don’t let “I’m not technical” hold you back
I think a lot of people get intimidated by this stuff: I’m not a developer, this is too technical. It is slower to get started because you have so many concepts to learn, but every time you get stuck, you can just ask AI what to do next.
I’ve got a computer science degree and nine months of building things with AI, and I still paste screenshots into Claude and ask “what is this, what do I do now?” all the time.
Building software with AI isn’t hard. The difficulty comes from the discomfort of working on something where you don’t know what you’re doing. Just remember that you can take it at your own pace and ask AI as many ‘stupid’ questions as you like – it’s a teacher with infinite patience.
Have the idea, then have a go
Not everyone has the time, energy or interest for a side project, and that’s fine. Maybe now isn’t the right time. But stay open to it and next time an idea for some little app pops into your head, don’t assume it’s out of reach. For years it was, for most people in UX. It isn’t any more.
And unlike a work project, whatever you build is yours. It can be something genuinely useful in your own life, and it’s fun and rewarding to make. You’re making something you want to exist.
Whether you’re an IC or a team leader, this is the fastest way to build the skills that we’re all going to need in the years to come. All you need to do is to take that first step and see how much you learn.
