I mean it literally. I didn’t know what code was.
When I say “zero,” people imagine a beginner who at least knows what a variable is. I didn’t. I had a computer at home used for reading news, listening to music, and answering emails. That was its full job description.
Then one night I asked myself a strange question: can AI teach me something? At my age, I can’t walk into a classroom and sit next to Gen Z students. But maybe a machine would have me.
The first question
My first conversation was with ChatGPT. My first question wasn’t “teach me programming.” It was practical, almost rude in its directness: I want to convert a TradingView indicator to MT5 so I don’t have to watch two screens. Can that be done?
The AI said yes — and did it.
So I asked the next question: If that’s possible, can I enter trades automatically instead of clicking by hand?
The AI said yes again.
That’s how it started. Not with a course. Not with a textbook. With two questions from a man who didn’t know what code was.
The 2 a.m. classroom
I have no teacher and no classroom. What I have is old age: I sleep badly, wake up around 2 a.m. completely alert, and sit down to finish what yesterday left undone. The free tier helps with discipline — when your questions run out, you stop, whether you want to or not.
Every night, the same ritual. Ask. Copy. Paste. Break something. Ask why it broke.
Ninety-nine percent
Let me be precise about the division of labor: the AI did 99% of the work. I copied and pasted. And my real contribution — the 1% — was asking what I call “de-dumbing” questions: What does this line of code actually mean? Why does it have to be there? If I remove it, what breaks in the whole system?
The AI never laughed. It explained, again and again, until a 60-year-old civil engineer understood.
Theory is theory
I was overjoyed when my first EA was born. The Strategy Tester drew a beautiful climbing curve — $3,000 becoming $94,000 on the screen. It felt like magic.
“My first backtest: $3,000 → $94,000. Beautiful — and a lie.”
Then reality: forex is brutal. Win three trades, give one back. None of those early bots ever brought home a profit. Theory is theory. The market doesn’t read backtests.
“Reality doesn’t read backtests.”
The same instinct later built the Shitcoin Radar: hundreds of new tokens appear every minute, and nobody can tell which are real and which are spam. So I built a machine to look.
What “zero” actually looked like
Zero looked like a man at 2 a.m., asking a machine to explain a single line of code like he was five years old — and the machine answering, patiently, every time.
I still can’t write code from scratch. What I learned is something else: how to ask, how to persist, and how to tell the difference between a beautiful curve on a screen and money in an account.
The tool did the heavy lifting. I take credit for exactly one thing: I showed up.
Next: My First 100 Stupid Questions — the dumbest question that unlocked everything.
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