Selina wrote almost every line of code before her CTO joined, despite coming from a non-technical starting point. Her advice: large language models are "super intelligence at your fingertips for like 20 bucks a month," and "anyone has an idea and is passionate enough about that idea can definitely go and build it."
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When Selina first picked up computer science in college "it was so intimidating," but with large language models these days she says "it's insane the amount of things you could learn" — and for "three cups of coffee in New York" a month, "that is really quite mind blowing." She "basically built it in two months, the MVP in two months, with no prior full stack experience," treating LLMs as "your partner in crime" — whatever you don't know, you ask. She leaned on tools like V0 for front-end design mockups, then translated them into code, and used AI tools built into coding IDEs to prompt on the fly. Her caveats: don't "blindly copy and paste," and know what you don't know so you ask the right things. She's now doing a master's in computer science for a stronger foundation, but her core message is "just find a project and go for it."