Ryan Carson has built companies for 25 years, including Treehouse, which taught over a million people to code. He knows what it takes to grow a team. So when he told me he’d raised $2 million in seed funding for his latest company, Untangle, an AI-powered divorce assistant, and had no plans to hire anyone, I wanted to understand what that actually looks like. Ryan stopped writing code professionally around 2008. He’d essentially been “abstracted away” from it by the responsibilities of running a funded startup, as he put it. Following the acquisition of Treehouse and inspired by the arrival of large language models, he decided to teach himself to code again with ChatGPT. Ryan learned Next.js, a framework he’d never touched, using AI as a tutor that was wrong often enough to keep him honest but patient enough that he could go as slowly as he needed. He shipped something. It didn’t work commercially, so he moved on, but he still learned a lot about iterating on AI products in the process.…