Ben went from relying on no-code tools to learning to code with Odin Project. In this interview he talks about how he learned programming and how he views AI-assisted coding.
Thanks to Nulab for sponsoring this edition:
A simpler way to track issues and keep your team aligned
If your issue tracker feels slow or messy, Backlog gives you a clean, organized, developer-friendly way to manage work across product, engineering, and QA. Create issues in seconds, assign owners, set priorities, track progress, and collaborate—all in one place.
Teams use Backlog to reduce noise, increase transparency, and keep work moving without the complexity of enterprise tools.
From feature requests to bugs to sprint planning, Backlog helps teams stay on top of every detail.
Hey, so can you introduce yourself?
Hello! I’m Ben, a product lead at Match My Email and indie hacker. As a product designer, I’ve worked on AI projects with companies like Slack, Salesforce and Google. I love discovering new music, reading non-fiction books, and improving my Spanish. I am from the US but living abroad in Montevideo, Uruguay with my wife and two cats.
Do you have any side projects you’re working on?
I believe the next big AI interface will be the spreadsheet.
Chat is great for one-off prompts, but more complex tasks need structure. As we see more and more people focus on leveraging AI at work, there needs to be a better way to use AI to do more: that way is spreadsheets.
That’s why I built PromptFast: a tool that lets you prompt from any AI model within Google Sheets.
It can really speed up certain tasks. I used it to categorize and analyze 300 competitor reviews in minutes. PromptFast can be used to rapidly run lots of data through AI models, compare different models, and run evaluations. You don’t need a fancy expensive AI tool to do this kind of work. This tool is low-cost and you connect to AI yourself so you pay market rates.
Why did you learn to code?
Since I was a teen, I wanted to code stuff, but didn’t know how. When I got into indie hacking (building my own solo projects), I didn’t know how to build anything.
At first, I made websites with no-code builders like Carrd (affiliate) , and it felt so cool to be able to create a website anyone in the world could visit. Over time though, I kept wanting to add more and more complicated functionality. Eventually the no-code tools would not let me take my ideas as far as I wanted. I realized I really wanted to be building apps.
So I committed myself to learning web development properly starting with really understanding the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and building more and more complicated projects over time.
In my day job I work as a product design lead and product manager. I started working closer and closer with devs in my role and wanted to learn how to speak their language more.
