“Make No Mistakes.” Oops, too late.

In February 2025, I was about to embark on recording my first full-length album. I, as a musician, did not have a website, and moreover I also did not have the money to record this album. Now you might think that I might be someone who lives and breathes only music, so I never really invested in learning technology. The truth couldn’t be further away. As a kid, I got my first PC in 2003 at the age of 8. I very soon learnt how to go to my friend’s house and use whatever tools I had at the time, floppy disks, burnt CDs, to make sure games would run on my PC. Games led to more things. I had to learn how to upgrade my RAM or GPU, back when they didn’t cost as much as a car. For all intents and purposes, I was a power user of every piece of technology I owned. If there was a way to hack or jailbreak or modify it to make it work better, I would do it, no questions asked.

So how did I end up with no website at the age of 30, about to launch my first album as a musician? Well, I went blind at the age of 20 and all the tech I loved and used all of a sudden regressed many layers. I used to use Sublime Text to do basic HTML coding. That software still, to this day, does not work. I used the terminal to jailbreak Mac software. That experience was garbage. And every free WYSIWYG web builder was not blind-accessible.

So I did what every broke musician does: ask a friend for a favour. My friend, Aadhithya Kota, built me my first website. As time went on though, I needed to add small features, tour dates, edits to a bio, adding a press contact. This became untenable pretty quickly. Asking for a favour every weekend isn’t fun. And that’s when I started using Cursor. Back in June 2025, when it was still a fork of VS Code and was still VoiceOver accessible, I was able to give it my codebase and edit it with some prompts. I still didn’t trust any of this, but since I was manually committing and pushing the code, I knew nothing that I hadn’t verified was going to get pushed.

Curiosity killed the cat though, and jazz musicians are famously referred to as cats, and I didn’t wanna die. So I acted on my curiosity. I had a documentary for my album and I wanted there to be dynamic content below it as the documentary played on the website. I had no idea how this would work or if it would. I was introduced to HTML5 and how a JSON file with time markings can control the dynamic content based on the Vimeo timestamp. This became really exciting really quickly. It took me 10 days or so to finish this whole project, something that would have probably taken an experienced web dev a couple of days. But I learnt a lot, and more importantly, I knew I could push this more.

So then the next step became a web app for the album. I wanted to see if people would actually recommend my album to their friends, and track that somehow. So I made this small mini-game. You sign up and say where you are from and it pins you on a globe. Once that is done, you can then recommend the album to your friends, and if they join with your referral link you get connected and earn points which unlocks rewards. This made me learn about node graphs, Three.js, database management, basic auth, having a backend, caching and interpolation. None of these things were terms I understood before this process.

And yet again, I knew I hadn’t hit the ceiling. This was in October 2025, and as I was getting done with this project the models just kept getting better and better. So I should have been able to do more ambitious work, but Cursor kept getting worse and worse for me as a blind user. It had features I didn’t care about and don’t even get me started on Electron and how it handles accessibility trees. Let’s just say I could finish my coffee in the time it took between a button click and the information being sent over to my screen reader announcer. I couldn’t deal with Claude Code because I just don’t find TUIs accessible. But then in January I switched to Codex, which was a big unlock for me. I will say though, even they are going down the same road of adding 9 zillion features that I couldn’t care less about.

I am not a software engineer. I am a very curious musician. And while it is true that AI is letting non-devs participate in the software creation process, I don’t think there is a future for that kind of work to happen if you refuse to learn anything. You cannot go “Fix bug, build feature. Make No Mistakes” and expect anything actually useful to come out the other end. I know this not because of any other reason but because I’ve done it enough. Think of it this way: if you asked a child to follow the recipe for Beef Wellington, and they didn’t even understand half the words in the recipe, you aren’t getting Beef Wellington for dinner that night.

So in the next blog post I’m going to talk about how I looked at every piece of technology that I wish I could use as a blind person, and what made me think I could, as a blind jazz musician, take on the task of creating those apps.