I Built a Learning App for My Mum. I’ve Never Written a Line of Code.

Authored by: David Moosmann

My mother and I played QuizDuel every single day for 12 years. Tens of thousands of questions. And I can’t tell you a single thing either of us learned from it.

The questions were random, the topics were obscure, and nothing ever repeated. You’d guess something about the French Revolution on Monday and never see it again. That’s not learning. That’s just entertainment with a trivia skin on it.

And the ads. My mum just wanted to play one round per day with her son. Instead she got pop-ups and video ads between every question. Almost impossible to skip.

So last December I decided to build her something better. A quick replacement, ready by Christmas. I’m a microbiologist with a Master’s degree. I’ve never written code before. But I’d been watching what people were doing with Claude Code and figured I could probably pull off something basic in a few weeks.

I had a working version ready by Christmas morning. Handed my mum the phone and watched her tap through the first few questions. She didn’t say much at first. Honestly I don’t think she fully grasped that her son had built this thing. But then she found the Harry Potter topic. And then she wouldn’t put it down.

Nobody expected what happened next. The whole family wanted in. Cousins, aunts, uncles. Everyone was challenging each other. That’s when I realized this wasn’t a Christmas gift anymore. I went all in.

Four months later, LearnClash (learnclash.com) lets you challenge anyone to a 1v1 quiz duel on literally any topic. Pick quantum physics, pick Harry Potter, pick 90s hip hop. AI generates fresh questions at three difficulty levels so it’s never the same game twice. You earn an ELO rating and climb through 8 competitive ranks from Iron to Phoenix. Spaced repetition is built in, so every question you see enters a cycle that brings it back at the right time until you remember it. Daily quests, friend challenges, shareable links. All on iOS and Android.

I built all of it using AI coding tools. My monthly spend is about $1,000 on four Max Claude Code subscriptions and CodeRabbit. I run four sessions at once, sometimes on different branches. It honestly feels like playing four chess games simultaneously. You’re constantly switching context, checking what each session did, catching mistakes, redirecting.

And there are a lot of mistakes. The first run almost never works. You typically need three rounds to get something right. But that’s the process. You plan, you review, you let the AI explain its architecture decisions until you understand them well enough to spot the errors yourself.

That’s the real skill in vibe coding. Not typing prompts. Understanding the system well enough to guide it. The AI is your tutor, your mentor, and your assistant at the same time. But it also needs you. It’s not a tool you point at a problem. It’s a collaboration where both sides are constantly teaching the other.

Before AI tools like this existed, building LearnClash would have taken a five-person team somewhere between 12 and 18 months. I did it solo in four months for a fraction of the cost.

I left my science career because I realized the 9-to-5 wasn’t for me. I’m a scientist at heart but I’m an entrepreneur even more. And creating something that helps people learn every day felt like a goal worth going all in on.

Right now we’re soft launched. Friends and family are testing, we’re improving daily, and we’re scaling slowly and organically. No investors, no pressure. The costs of running a solo AI-built company are low enough that we can do this the right way.

My mum still plays every day. She’s getting pretty good at even difficult Harry Potter trivia. And for the first time in 12 years of daily quiz games, she’s actually remembering things.

Author bio: David Moosmann is the founder of LearnClash (learnclash.com), a competitive learning app on iOS and Android.