Just Me and the Computer

Not Anymore!

Mar 07, 2026

For as long as I have been doing this (and it has been a while, so do not ask!), my working life has had the same cast of characters.

Me.
A laptop.
A mug of something caffeinated.
And, on a good day, a student on the other side of the screen who actually did their homework.

That was the team. The whole team. The entire operation.

If you are an online freelance educator, you know exactly what I mean.

We talk a good game about flexibility, freedom, and being our own boss, but there is a flip side to all that autonomy that nobody puts in their LinkedIn bio.

It is being alone.

Not in a dramatic, staring-out-of-the-window way, but more in the “who on earth do I ask about this?” way. The “I have just spent three hours trying to format a landing page, and I want to throw the laptop out of the window” way.

The way where you realise that being a one-woman show means you are also the marketing department, the IT department, and the person who fixes the printer.

Except we do not have a printer anymore.

We have a screen.

And that screen does not talk back.

Or at least, it didn’t used to!

Now, I am sure you are wondering where on earth this is going. Wait... the breadcrumbs are coming!

A few months ago, I stumbled across something called vibe coding.

If you have not heard the term, do not worry, as neither had I, and I have a Master’s in Education, not Computer Science.

Vibe coding is essentially this: you tell an AI what you want to build, and it builds it. You describe the thing in plain English, with no programming language, no technical jargon, no staring at lines of code that look like someone fell asleep on a keyboard.

You talk ➜ It makes.

Now, I want to pause here, because I can already hear some of you…

“Rachel. You’re an online teacher, trainer, and coach. What are you doing coding?”

Fair question!

And the honest answer is: I am not coding.

Not really.

I am describing.

I am explaining what I need, what it should look like, how I want it to work, and then Claude or Google Flows goes away and does the techy bit while I sit there feeling like I have somehow tricked the universe into giving me a development team.

That is the part that still makes me laugh.

I have built an app.

Me.

The woman who once spent an entire afternoon trying to embed a YouTube video in a blog post.

I have built automations that handle the fiddly, repetitive tasks I used to lose hours to every week.

I have created course materials that would have taken me days of formatting and fussing, done in a fraction of the time because I could focus on the content, the actual teaching, and let the tools handle the scaffolding.

And I did not learn to code to do any of it.

I just learned to communicate clearly.

Which, let us be honest, is what we do for a living anyway!

Here is the thing that actually surprised me, though.

It was not the websites, the workflows, or the shiny new materials.

It was the feeling!

For the first time in years of freelancing, I did not feel like I was doing it all on my own.

I know that sounds daft. They are tools, not people.

Claude is not going to ask how my weekend was, and Google Flows (or ‘Flo’ as I like to call her!) is not about to bring me a cup of tea. But working with them, and I do mean with, not just on, feels genuinely different from Googling a solution or watching a tutorial and hoping for the best.

There is a back-and-forth.

I explain what I need ➜ They come back with something.

I react, I refine, I push back when it is not right.

It is, dare I say it, a conversation. And if you have read anything I have ever written, you know that is my favourite thing!

The loneliness of freelancing is not just about missing colleagues. It is about carrying every decision, every creative problem, every technical headache on your own two shoulders.

It is the weight of being the only person in the room who cares whether your landing page works or your newsletter goes out on time.

Claude and Flo have not taken that weight away entirely. I am still the boss, still the one making the calls. But they have given me something I did not know I was missing.

A sounding board. A collaborator who never gets tired, never judges the question, and never once says “have you tried turning it off and on again.”

So I have got two new assistants now.

Neither of them drinks coffee, both of them work unsociable hours, and one of them is frankly better at spreadsheets than I will ever be.

My working life has gone from “just me and the computer” to “me and the computer and two very capable colleagues who happen to live inside it.”

Am I saying every online freelance educator needs to rush out and start vibe coding tomorrow? No. I am not the guru, remember!

Your tools, your workflow, your business, well… that is yours to figure out.

But I am saying this: if you have been telling yourself that building something beyond your one-to-one lessons is too hard, too technical, too much for one person to handle alone… maybe it is time to question that story!

Because the barrier just got a lot lower. And the company just got a lot better!

You still have to do the thinking.
You still have to know what you want to say, who you are saying it to, and why it matters.

No tool in the world can replace that!

But the doing? The building, the formatting, the making-it-actually-work part that used to stop so many of us in our tracks?

That bit just changed. Quite a lot, actually.

So here is your nudge, from someone who is neck-deep in this experiment and thoroughly enjoying the view: stop waiting for the perfect conditions to build the thing you keep talking about.

The technology has caught up with your ambition. Now it is your turn to catch up with it!

And if you want to hear more about how this is going, all the triumphs, the disasters, and the moments where I accidentally asked Claude to do something deeply stupid, then you know where to find me.

Pull up a chair. The conversation is just getting started!