Building My Own AI Coding Agent From Scratch: A Learning Journey
Dev.to AI
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Generative AI
AI Tools
A €5 VPS. A Telegram bot. A Python script that kept growing. This is the story of what I learned by choosing to build rather than borrow, warts, dead ends, and all. The Decision In early 2025, AI coding tools were everywhere. Copilot in your editor, Cursor rewriting your files, Devin promising to replace entire sprints of work. OpenClaw had become the fastest-downloaded agent on GitHub, and anyone serious about local inference was buying a Mac Mini to run models at home. I was tempted by both options.