Last night I ran a getting started session for MVP Club. We were setting up Cline, walking through API keys, watching the rate limiter tick up. And I caught myself saying something that made me pause:

"That takes me back. That used to be our lives for many evenings."

I was talking about rate limits. From early 2025.

I'm nostalgic for twelve months ago.

The Broncos Connection

January 2024. Matt and I are watching the Broncos get absolutely crushed by the Bills in the playoffs. One monitor on the game, one monitor on VS Code. We're finally giving Cline a real try.

And it's a miracle.

The thing can just... edit your code. Directly. No more copy-pasting from ChatGPT. No more "here's what you should change" followed by fifteen minutes of meatball surgery. It reads your files. It writes your files. It mostly gets things right.

We're giddy. This changes everything.

We're also watching the API bill tick up like a taxi meter. $5 an hour. The excess! Can the treasury bear such expense?

One eye on the rate limiter. One eye on the scoreboard. Both situations looking grim.

Fast Forward One Year

January 2025. Same matchup. Broncos vs Bills.

Except this time, Broncos win in an overtime thriller.

And this time, I'm not even looking at VS Code anymore. Cline? API keys? Rate limits? Distant memories. We're cranking out code with Claude Code all day. We don't think about tokens. We don't watch bills tick up. We just build.

The thing that was a miracle a year ago now feels... primitive? Inconvenient?

What kind of spoiled nonsense is that?

I Am Complaining About Miracles

A year ago, an AI that could directly edit my code was science fiction becoming reality. I was watching it happen in real time, feeling like I was living in the future.

Now I catch myself thinking, "Ugh, remember when you had to paste your API key into settings? Remember when you had to watch your usage?"

The bar for what I can complain about keeps dropping. My expectations for ease and power keep getting smashed by the next generation of tools. Every few months, something comes along that makes the previous miracle look like rubbing sticks together for fire.

During last night's session, we hit a rate limit on the Gemini free tier. I said "that takes me back" like I was reminiscing about dial-up internet. It's been one year.

What This Means for You

If you've been thinking about getting into AI tools - vibe coding, agents, whatever - and you're worried you've missed the window, that you're already behind, that the ship has sailed...

You haven't. You're not. It hasn't.

It is easier to start today than it was a year ago.

It will be easier to start next month than it is today.

There is no falling behind in the AI era. Every generation of tools lowers the barrier further. The people who started in 2024 with API keys and rate limit anxiety aren't ahead of you - they're just more nostalgic.

The miracles keep stacking. The friction keeps dropping. The window is always open.

Come Watch Us Fumble Through It

We run getting started sessions at MVP Club where we walk through exactly this stuff - setting up your environment, picking your tools, building your first thing. You can watch us hit rate limits and debug in real time. You can ask questions. You can see someone else make the mistakes first.

Check out our getting started sessions on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2), or just jump into the MVP Club community and start asking questions. We're all figuring this out together, and the best time to start is whenever you decide to start.

A year from now, you'll be nostalgic for today.

Ryan Brodsky is a co-founder of MVP Club, where he helps professionals adopt AI through practice-based coaching. He taught programming for three years before this and still can't believe he gets to build apps on his phone now.