My son taught me AI coding at 73. I was scared to hit 'enter' — now I feel free.

• Carol Merlo wanted to build her own website without Weebly or Wix. She asked her son, Kevin Masterson, to help.
• Masterson taught her to vibe code. "Sometimes thirty seconds can save her an hour of headache," he said.
• Merlo was worried about clicking the "enter" key. "You're not going to break it," he assured her.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Carol Merlo and her son, Kevin Masterson. Merlo is a 73-year-old entrepreneurship coach from Dallas. Masterson is a 41-year-old AI mentor from Lewisville, Texas. It's been edited for length and clarity.

Carol Merlo: I used ChatGPT for personal stuff, like, what supplement should I take for this? What do you think of that? What's wrong with this bush?

Kevin Masterson: It's real! She totally doctored up a bush and brought it back to life with AI.

Merlo: I use ChatGPT for that because it doesn't need to speak in complete sentences. I still rely on ChatGPT for images. Claude is great for human language. It's not stilted. My husband uses Gemini. I don't know why.

Masterson: I've been vibe coding for about a year, getting really into the meat and potatoes. I trained a friend of mine, with whom I worked at a restaurant, and we got good enough together to win a hackathon. I thought: This is duplicatable.

Who do I care about more than anybody? My mom. She talked about building a website, and she didn't want to be dependent on Weebly. I was like, "Do you want to learn how to do it yourself? I can walk you through stuff. I'm not going to be on the keyboard. I'll just say words."

Merlo: I've been building websites for as long as we've had the internet. WordPress was really hard and labor-intensive. Then I switched over to Wix for a minute, then Weebly. My husband also has a website, and we've got a third website for something else.

I got an email about a month or two ago, saying they were going to make me pay for two years and that they were raising my rate. At that point, I went to Kevin. I said: "What can I do so that I'm not having to pay so much for a website?"

He started with this ideation phase. What do you want? What's it look like? What's it feel like? We had a long conversation.

Masterson: The lessons were in-person. I'd sit in the corner of the room, and she'd be on her computer. At the beginning, it's so important to have a face. It was more structured sessions and more handholding.

Merlo: The difference between this and the drag-and-drop interfaces is that it's all words. You have to be able to type the words of the thing you want. With ChatGPT, I'll send it a picture or a clip. Well, no pictures here. This is coding.

I'm old, so I come from the world of reading. I'm highly academic, and everything I do is words. Nowadays, people don't have the patience for it. They don't even have the patience for videos. You need a clip. How are you going to learn this in a clip? So, people have to learn patience and the willingness to do it.

Masterson: She was a little timid at times. Like, "I don't want to bother you, but I've got another question." That's what I'm here for! Sometimes thirty seconds can save her an hour of headache.

Merlo: It was completely new for me. I developed a Word document that tells me what to do here, what to do there, and what this word means.

The other thing that was the most challenging was acronyms. Kevin started talking to me, and I was like: What the heck is he saying? Like, what's a CLI? I said, "You've got to dumb it down for me." Sometimes I'd go into regular Claude to ask what terms meant so I could get context.

I would be hesitant to click "enter." I'd say: "I've typed this thing in. Now what?" He'd say: "Click 'enter.'"

He told me, "You're not going to break it, and you can go back to the original, so you don't have to worry about it being wrong." Many people are worried about it being wrong, especially when you're learning something. That was very encouraging for me.

Masterson: It became more back-and-forth. She sent me a few emails, and we did a bit of video conferencing.

Merlo: What Kevin taught me is that there's no limit. Whatever you can envision, you can ask Claude Code to do for you. I'm no longer limited by knowledge; now I'm only limited by my imagination. That's huge.

I'm paying way less: $9.99 a month for another platform that works using Claude Code. Now I have this thing, and nobody's going to upsell me or do things that are going to cost me money that I don't want to spend.

Right now, the website is basic. Now, I'm going in and doing refinements. There are other things I've done on other websites that are more fun and not as boring as the one I have.

It's great, it's just not spiffy. I'm spiffing it up.