How I Started Learning How Websites Work (And How AI Helped)

When I joined Learn Prompting, the onboarding wasn't the usual "upload content into a CMS."

I had to learn GitHub, work directly with a Next.js codebase, and contribute articles through pull requests. For many marketers this setup feels intimidating — "too technical," "not for me," — but I was genuinely excited to dive in.

Editing content inside a repo, pushing changes, understanding the folder structure, seeing how components work… it immediately clicked for me. It felt like a natural extension of working with technical material every day.

Over time I started exploring the internals of the website on my own. Step by step. Small changes. Reading code. Breaking things and fixing them. Then one day Feddy introduced me to Cursor, which gave me a much easier way to experiment.

Cursor became a sandbox for reverse-engineering how websites work:

• Ask the AI to generate a change
• Inspect what it touched
• See how that impacted the final page
• Learn the pattern
• Apply it intentionally next time

Half a year later, it has become a regular part of how I work. I've used it to implement SEO improvements, understand how components are wired together, and write small scripts to automate technical SEO edits across multiple files.

For some marketers, a "GitHub + Next.js + AI-assisted reverse engineering" workflow would be an immediate no. For me, it became one of the most interesting parts of the job, and something I still keep learning from.