Boris Cherny's story is worth everyone reading once.

Once homeless, sleeping in his car. Later he taught himself programming and became a CTO at a tech company.

His process of tracking down a memory leak bug became a classic case study in the tech community.

But what I want to say isn't motivational chicken soup, because this person is the one who built Claude Code that you're using right now.

Stories of "from zero to one" in the AI era will become more and more common, because AI has flattened the learning curve. It used to take 3 years to self-teach programming, but now with Claude's help it might take 3 months.

AI has lowered the skill threshold. But the threshold for willpower hasn't dropped one bit.