From Early Adopter to AI Instructor: Teaching 500 Engineers to Build with LLMs

I started building with ChatGPT the week it launched. A couple of years later, I was teaching nearly 500 engineers how to do the same. Here's how that happened. Early days In November 2022, I was a Staff Engineer at a startup. ChatGPT had just dropped and I immediately started experimenting. Not to generate code, but to understand what was possible. I would paste in modules I was working on and ask it to explain what was happening, then use it to review my code before submitting PRs. Within weeks, it had completely replaced Stack Overflow for me. It was not just answering questions. It was teaching me things in the context of my actual codebase. Nobody was calling it a strategy yet. It was just a novelty to most, but I had identified real value and was determined to master the tool. It reminded me of the early internet, where you could suddenly find information that was previously only available at the library. Getting vocal I kept going deeper, using AI tools daily while many people w