You already know the language
Where do you start building with AI if you have never written a line of code? Andrej Karpathy's answer is a language most of us already speak, and a skill most leaders already use.
Earlier this week I shared a story about how I created my personal assistant, Mr. Dayone, and it isn't just a system on my laptop anymore. It lives on my phone, and I message it the way I'd message a colleague. I ended that post by saying everyone should try building something.
Easy to say. But where do you start if you've never written a line of code?
Andrej Karpathy, who led AI at Tesla and helped found OpenAI, put it in one line. The hottest new programming language is English.
The catch is that a messy thought gets a messy result. "Help me plan my week" gets you something generic. "I have three meetings tomorrow, tell me what each one needs from me and what to prepare tonight" gets you something you can use.
Most of us have done that for years when briefing a team. It's the same skill.
So you already know the language. Pick one small problem and write it down clearly and start creating.
Where Mr. Dayone actually lives
Mr. Dayone lives inside my WhatsApp. Meta has started letting people connect their own AI agents there, and you can bring one from almost any provider. Mine runs on Claude.
It is still being tested. WhatsApp began rolling it out to a small number of beta users on Android in early September 2026, and on iPhone later that month, with a wider release expected in the coming months. So you may not see it yet.
One thing worth knowing before you try it. Chats with these agents are not end-to-end encrypted like your normal WhatsApp chats. The messages pass through a Meta service, and the company behind the agent can read them. An agent only sees its own chat, not your other conversations, but think about what you share with yours.
What's the first thing you'd ask it to build?
The pointer
Andrej Karpathy, Software Is Changing (Again), his keynote at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, 17 June 2025. The line on the card is from the vibe coding section, about 29 minutes in. "The hottest new programming language is English" is older, a post of his from January 2023. One honest caveat: the talk was given to founders and students. The first half works for anyone. The second half, on building software for agents, gets more technical.