I'm a textile engineer who can't code. Here are my brutally honest first numbers building products with AI.
I spent four years in the denim industry. Zero coding background — I've never written a real line of code.
On May 24 I listed my first product. Everything is built entirely with AI (Claude Code, n8n): I write the plain-English instructions, the AI writes the code, and I refuse to move on when something feels wrong.
Here's exactly where I am 24 days later, no rounding up:
- 207 views
- 2 sales
- $34.98
Both sales were small Obsidian plugins — not the bigger SaaS boilerplates I expected to sell. That surprised me, and it's changing what I build next.
I'm not here to sell a dream. I'm documenting the whole thing — what works, what doesn't, the exact prompts — on a site I just launched. If you're a non-coder wondering whether this is actually real, follow along and watch it succeed or fail in public.
ibrahimharbutlu.com
Happy to answer anything about the process.
This kind of radical transparency is exactly what the IH community needs more of. Real numbers, real struggle, not just the polished "we're growing" posts.
The pattern you described — describing what you want in plain English and having AI write/test the code — is genuinely where the next wave of builders is coming from. The skill isn't typing code anymore, it's knowing what to build and being able to review what comes back.
We faced something similar building twRty Blogboat — we're not a huge dev team, but we shipped a web app + iOS + Android by staying ruthlessly focused on the one job: AI writes the blog, you publish everywhere in one click. No feature creep.
Your honesty about the numbers early on will make your eventual breakthrough story 10x more credible. Keep going.
Appreciate this, really. "The skill isn't typing code anymore, it's knowing what to build and reviewing what comes back" — that's exactly it, you said it better than I did.
And the ruthless-focus point hits home. Shipping web + iOS + Android as a small team by keeping the workflow to one job is impressive — that's the same discipline I'm trying to hold onto (it's way too easy to let the AI talk me into feature creep). Going to take a proper look at twRty Blogboat. Thanks for the push.
The honesty is refreshing — most build-in-public posts either celebrate
big wins or dramatically pivot after week one.
Curious what "can't code" looks like in practice for you — are you
using AI to generate code you then deploy, or purely no-code tools?
The line keeps blurring.
Thanks! It's the first one, not no-code. I describe what I want in plain English, the AI (mostly Claude Code) writes the actual code, and I read it, test it, fix it with more prompts, then commit and deploy to Vercel myself. So it's real Next.js / Astro repos on GitHub, not a drag-and-drop builder.
The honest catch: I can't write the code from scratch, but I've slowly learned to read it and tell when something's off. That "refusing to move on when it feels wrong" part is the actual skill — not the typing.