Notepad and the Butter Knife

When I decided to build a website, I did what any sensible person with a passing familiarity with HTML and a dangerous amount of confidence would do.

I opened Notepad.

I know.

It’s the digital equivalent of deciding to renovate your kitchen and reaching for a butter knife. Technically a tool. Technically capable of spreading something around. Not exactly the instrument for the job.

I’d built a SharePoint site. I knew basic HTML. I wasn’t starting from zero. But I wasn’t a developer either. I was somewhere in the middle, which turns out to be its own special kind of lost.

The AI agents were giving me code — chunks of it, confidently presented — and I needed somewhere to put it. A text editor seemed like the logical answer. It’s just text. How hard could it be?

Harder than it looks when you’re staring at 2,000 lines of undifferentiated JavaScript with no highlighting, no error flags, and an AI agent cheerfully telling you to “just drop this snippet into your existing logic.”

I’m someone who spent two decades in a world where a misplaced comma broke the system and “approximately correct” wasn’t a thing. And here was my brilliant AI assistant waving vaguely at a wall of text like a contractor shouting directions from a moving car.

It wasn’t easier than writing HTML from scratch. It just moved the confusion around.

After about a week of this I finally typed something like: “There’s got to be a better way to do this.”

The agent suggested VS Code.

I want to be clear about how obvious this was. To everyone except me. VS Code is a proper code editor. It highlights syntax, flags errors, and lets AI agents make changes directly in the file instead of handing you a bucket of code and wishing you luck.

I had six folders on my desktop by then. UkeScale_v1. UkeScale_New. UkeScale_FINAL. The one that actually worked was labeled LIVE SITE in capitals. The digital equivalent of police tape.

VS Code didn’t fix everything. But it meant I could finally see what I was working with.