I didn't start with a plan. I started by playing with tools and figuring out where they fit. This is that path, from curiosity to capability, with the tools and the false starts included.
Start here. The whole path on one page: which tools, in what order, and what each phase actually taught me.
Curiosity. Gemini, Nano Banana, and NotebookLM. Playing with tools to see what they could do. The lesson: no single tool does everything, the skill is combining them.
Confidence. Perplexity and Cursor. Perplexity as a daily learning partner, then first vibe coding on web crawling and data prep. Knowledge on one side, the confidence to build on the other.
Capability. Claude Code, dashboards, automation. A weekly competitive intelligence pipeline across the ERP market, strategy decks generated programmatically, and 150+ friction points mapped for AI agents.