I'm supposed to be doing calculus homework right now. Instead, I'm writing this. Which is kind of the whole problem.
It's 11 PM on a Tuesday and I have a test tomorrow that I'm definitely not ready for. But I shipped a tool today that like, actually works, and people are using it, and honestly that feeling is way better than getting an A on a test would be. I know that sounds insane. My parents definitely think it's insane.
I'm 17. I've built five AI tools in the last year and a half. I've also gotten a B- in AP Comp Sci, which is genuinely embarrassing considering what I do in my free time. The disconnect is real and I think about it constantly.
Let me back up though. I didn't grow up wanting to be a programmer. I was that kid who thought coding was for people with weird brains who liked math. I still don't really like math, honestly. I like building things. I like the feeling of making something that didn't exist before. The coding part is just... the tool I use to do that.
I taught myself to code in the most chaotic way possible. YouTube videos at 2 AM. Stack Overflow copy-paste (don't tell anyone). Asking Claude questions that were probably really dumb. Reading other people's code and being like "oh, you can just... do that?" There was no structure. No curriculum. Just me being frustrated that I couldn't build the thing in my head and then slowly figuring out how to make it real.
The first tool I shipped was genuinely terrible. It was an AI writing assistant that didn't really do anything better than existing tools. But I made it. I deployed it. People used it. And that was the moment I realized I didn't care about being the best at coding. I cared about shipping.
That's when school became this weird thing for me. Not in a rebellious way. More like... I was learning way more by building than I was in class. In AP Comp Sci, we spent three weeks on recursion. I learned recursion in like two hours because I needed it for a project. The difference is that one felt pointless and the other felt real.
I've shipped five tools now. A few have actual users. One made a little bit of money. None of them are going to make me rich or change the world or whatever. But each one taught me something that no class could have. I learned about deployment, about user feedback, about how to actually talk to people about what you built. I learned that shipping something imperfect is infinitely better than perfecting something that doesn't exist.
The school thing is still weird though. I'm in the college application process right now and it's honestly broken in a way that I can't stop thinking about. They want to see that I'm well-rounded. That I do sports or music or whatever. That I get good grades. That I take hard classes. But they don't really know what to do with someone who's like "yeah I built a business in my spare time." It doesn't fit into the boxes.
I have a 3.7 GPA but it would be higher if I didn't spend so much time on my projects. I'm not in any clubs because I don't have time. I don't play sports. I'm just... this weird kid who builds things. And colleges seem to want to know if that's a phase or if it's real. But how do I prove that? I can't put "shipped five AI tools" on my resume in a way that sounds legitimate to someone who doesn't understand what that means.
The balance is genuinely hard. Some days I feel like I'm failing at both. I'm not a serious student because I'm distracted by my projects. I'm not a serious builder because I have to go to school and do homework. I'm just kind of... stuck in the middle, doing both things at like 70% capacity.
But here's the thing that I've realized: I don't regret it. Not even a little bit. Yeah, I'm tired. Yeah, my parents worry about my grades. Yeah, I probably won't get into MIT or whatever. But I'm learning things that matter to me. I'm building things that exist in the world. I'm figuring out who I am outside of the school system.
The homework thing is real though. I genuinely struggle with it. Not because I can't do it, but because it feels so pointless when I could be building. Like, I could spend three hours on a problem set that I'll forget about in a week, or I could spend three hours shipping a feature that people will actually use. The choice seems obvious to me, even though I know it's not obvious to literally everyone else.
I think what I'm trying to say is that I'm not special or anything. I'm just a kid who found something that makes sense to him and decided to do it. And yeah, that means I'm not doing some other things. That's the trade-off. I'm okay with it, even if it's weird.
The college thing will work out somehow. Maybe I'll go to a school that gets it. Maybe I'll take a gap year and build more. Maybe I'll figure out how to actually balance both things like a normal person. I don't know yet.
But I know that I'd rather be the person who ships imperfect things than the person who gets perfect grades. And I think that's worth something, even if the system doesn't quite know how to measure it yet.