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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Pawel Mniszak, a 34-year-old construction superintendent who lives in Vancouver. It's been edited for length and clarity.My dad made his keep working in construction, specializing in towers.
He is dyslexic, so languages and writing comes hard for him. I would translate for him and copy drawings. I learned the industry from my dad.My parents always pushed me to get an education. I got a degree from Douglas College in programming and business management. I understood the business side more and was better at that than at being a coder.I tried to get a job in programming, but I'd always talk to people who did the work better than I did. I wasn't the greatest programmer. I tried to do some websites for people here, but they didn't understand how much work it actually takes. Here's $500 for a website, and I'd spend a month on it. The money was never there.I got good at construction, and I stuck with that. There are so many similarities, in a funny way, between construction and programming. You've got to lay a good foundation, stand the walls, and do the plumbing and electrical. There's a structure to it. Now, I've moved on from working with my dad, and I'm a superintendent.Two years ago, I started my vibe coding journey. I had a second baby, and I had to do something with my time while holding the baby. Every evening, I was plugging away, learning. I got excited. I didn't have to actually memorize languages anymore, which I struggled with.Then, I started building.I was feeding my code to ChatGPT. I started to get more into it, solving problems, asking questions. Then, I got Cursor. It was like getting a Ferrari for the first time; I was enamored. But the token usage was becoming expensive. For the last month, I've been using Claude, and it's been amazing.I always knew I wanted a tool to help me out with paperwork. I know how busy it is on-site. Upper management doesn't realize how much time paperwork can take up in the morning.I can have 50 to 110 people on the job site, and the expectation is to have the paperwork completed. Usually, that meant I had to do all of them. They would have to sign off on whatever I wrote. In theory, the foremen are supposed to identify what they're doing, what the hazards are, and how they are going to fix it. That's the basic process of safety.A superintendent can be stuck doing the paperwork. We've been given software to help do this, but, because of the price and seating, the software is given to me. It didn't trickle down to the subcontractors and workers.I'm like: Screw it, I'm going to make my own FLRA thing. When a worker comes in, I hand out the tasks for the day, and by 8 a.m., you fill out this form, you send it to me, and I'll audit it. I learned to vibe code it, and the stuff that I learned started coming back to me. It's been an exponential learning curve.I created a stable-ish copy, which was a website hosted on Vercel. It was as simple as: fill out the form, convert it to a PDF, attach it to an email, and send it to me. I didn't even tell my company I was doing it. I told my guys: "You guys are my guinea pigs." They thought I was a wizard.I got overly confident, and the worker side was stable, so I created a supervisor layer where you could receive and review the forms. It also helped me with note-taking, the way that I did it. I made a product for the way my brain operates.I got eager, added Stripe to see what would happen if I monetized it, and posted it on Reddit. It got butchered. My Stripe stuff didn't function, and I added features until it broke.I had security vulnerabilities. I didn't even realize I had a function where you can communicate to all accounts. One guy used it to broadcast a message to all my workers: "AI slop."I went down a security rabbit hole. I chatted with him and said, "Thank you for doing this. I obviously need to learn a lot more. Once I make my next version, can you help me?"He apologized and said, "Sure, I'll help you out."I don't know; he's a rando on the internet, so we'll see. Either way, it opened up a whole new world for me about security.After I posted on Reddit, I started again. The old one is still hanging around. It's good for me to use for note-taking.The new one is going to be a little bit of LinkedIn meets construction management programs like Procore and SiteDocs.I'm rebuilding now, and trying to start with a strong foundation.
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