I vibe coded a school management platform over the past 3 months and it has led me to pursue a software development degree. I need an honest gut check from actual software developers.

I don't want to bore anyone but I am seeking genuine advice from real people and I don't know where to exactly begin.

When I say "I built..." here in this post, it means I instructed Claude Code to program the things I wanted to be in the platform. I started this project as a need to have a unified school system for our school.

The platform is pretty large: 105,000 lines of Typescript - 410 files - 66k client/39k server (numbers from Claude). I'm on commit #976 from GitHub. I use Railway for MySQL and deployment and I'm on deployment #409. Cloudflare R2 for storage. I don't have a sense of whether that's normal or a stupid amount. I am just very inexperienced.

The platform is feature rich:

• Calendars
• inbox messaging system
• incident and infraction systems
• compliance with the ministry of education
• student grades
• attendance
• tardiness trackers
• alert levels for students in red zones
• student individual plans
• ClassDojo like features
• personality assessments
• administration tools
• tokenizing the color scheme of the platform for easy changes
• creating themes
• creating and designing student/staff/admin/parent portals
• google auth
• Sentry for error checking
• Created a PWA to test how it would look on mobile and teachers are already lightly using it as an app but it has the full features
• integrated Gemini Flash 2.5 to give alerts of students needing attention and to produce reports and snapshots.

...and just a lot more and there is so much more I want to integrate with Ai in the platform for different use cases. Each feature took a few hours to a few days of completing. I constructed an architecture and hierarchy file that updates itself after each addition or alteration of the codebase. I made one for me to see visually and one for Claude to use as a map to find his way through the codebase and to document everything.

I know it's messy. I've asked Claude several times to audit the codebase for bugs, security issues, dead databases, scalability (or ability to withstand a large number of simultaneous users), and garbage code. Claude would list them out and we'd go through them in order of severity. Made sure to keep the blast radius small for those changes. We ran through this process 2-3 times now. Claude says it's good and secure after the rounds of changes, but I don't know to what standards he measures 'solid'.

Throughout all this process, I've really enjoyed the creation side of software. In that I can imagine something and build it. I've taken a real interest in all of it, how it is built and how it is all connected. I'm drowning in so many things I don't understand that I've ordered Claude to explain to me things/jargon/tools used in each process he is doing to learn as much as I can. It is a complete ocean and I feel like a tadpole. I want to learn it. I was doing 8 hour sessions and wouldn't feel the time because i genuinely enjoyed the process.

Claude always praises the work we've done and praises my "architectural orchestrating" skills. I ask him to be real with me. Validation when deserved but be real and give it to me straight. I don't know if that argument still requires him to compliment me but I don't trust the praises.

I don't know if I have a general talent(minus the coding)/liking in terms of software development so this where I ask for the gut punch.

I need a degree. I don't have one. I was going to do Applied Artificial Intelligence but the math completely turned me off as it seemed impossible hard. I ended up settling on a Software Development Degree with electives in Cybersecurity. It's an online degree and self paced so I think it'll allow me to do some Artificial intelligence certificates alongside it.

Is this the correct educational path moving forward? I'm not looking for a junior coding position when I finish (I'm 37). I just want to be competent in being able to create software, know how to deploy/ship efficiently and securely, and be able to supplement them with Ai. I want to be able to understand my software from A-Z.