I Lost My First Project to a File Path

I wrote my first line of code on 3 January 2024. I was fifteen. I had never programmed, I did not know what a repository was, and I was building a browser-based video editor because I did not know that was an unreasonable thing to start with.

It was called Vision AI Demo. For about six weeks it ran.

What happened

I reorganised the files. That is the whole story.

I moved things into folders that made more sense to me, which broke every import in the project simultaneously. I did not know how to trace an import error. I did not know how to undo it, because I had no version control — I did not know what version control was. There was no backup, because it had not occurred to me that there might need to be one.

The codebase was unrecoverable. Not corrupted, not lost from disk. Just in a state I did not have the knowledge to reverse, which from where I was standing is the same thing.

The part that actually hurt

It cost €200, and the €200 was not mine. I had borrowed it from my younger cousin.

I want to be exact about that because it is the detail people skip when they tell this kind of story, and it is the detail that made it real. Losing your own money is a lesson. Losing money you took from a family member who is younger than you, on a thing you were sure about, is something else. I had to go and say it out loud to him.

What I got wrong about it afterwards

For a long time I told myself this was a hard problem that beat me. It was not. It was an easy problem I did not have the tools for, and those are completely different failures.

The distinction matters because they have different remedies. A hard problem means you need to get smarter. A missing tool means you need to find out what already exists. I lost that project to the second thing while treating it like the first, which is why the next attempt was not much better.

There were five more prototypes across 2024. None of them shipped.

What changed

Between December 2024 and early 2025 I stopped building and studied. JavaScript, then TypeScript, then React, building small useless utilities one after another until the fundamentals stopped sliding off. All of that came before a single line of what became FlashFX.

That period is the least interesting part of the story and it is the one that actually mattered. The prototypes were exciting and produced nothing. Three months of deliberately unglamorous practice produced everything after.

Why I keep telling it

Not because failure is secretly good. It is not — I lost real money that belonged to someone else, and the year I spent flailing is a year I do not get back.

I tell it because the version of this story that gets told publicly usually starts at the part where it works. Four rebuilds, 300,000 lines of TypeScript, 8,000 people using it. That version is true and it is useless to anyone standing where I was standing in January 2024.

The useful part is that the thing which stopped me was not talent or difficulty. It was not knowing that git init existed.