Building an App Nobody Taught Him to Build
Tino Triste didn’t plan to end up writing production code. He set out to keep a Bolton tapas bar stocked with sangria while finishing a photography degree. Two decades, a stint in the Portuguese Marines and a full career pivot into AI-powered development later, he sat down with Chris on the Rebellious Times Podcast to talk through his reinvention mindset, the same one that’s carried him from Portugal to Bolton to building Flutura, a therapy app now used by CBT practitioners.
A Reinvention Mindset Forged in the Portuguese Marines
Before any of the career pivots, there was national service. Tino chose the Portuguese Marines at 19, not knowing how to swim, partly to outdo his brother, who’d gone through military police training before him. The posting ran nearly two years: weeks at a time in the field, cold and wet, with instructors telling recruits they’d fail and no positive reinforcement offered in return. He credits that stretch directly for how he handles rejection now: “You get used to people telling you you’re gonna fail,” he said, “so it doesn’t really faze me in business.”
From Product Design to Photography to an SEO Rabbit Hole
Tino’s working life started in product design in Portuguese high school, then camera work on football broadcasts, then a photography and video production degree at Bolton University, where he first met Chris (Tino worked at the same tapas restaurant). The photography industry was collapsing just as he graduated, killed off by digital cameras, so he moved into web and graphic design, building sites with layout tables before CSS existed. That led to his first digital job, managing websites and email for Chris’s brother’s company, Digital Webtronics, and from there into SEO around 2004 or 2005. He stayed in that field for the next 15 years.
How AI Lowered the Bar for Everyone Who Wants to Build
Tino pins the real shift to the last six months, not years. Building even a simple website used to require someone who understood CSS and HTML, even with drag-and-drop tools in play. Now, he says, AI functions as the technical engineer: someone with no coding background can build a working app in a few hours. The harder problem hasn’t gone away, though. Getting an MVP out is easy now; maintaining it to a real standard and growing it with users is still the actual work.
Becoming His Own AI-Powered Developer
Flutura started with an outsourced development team in Eastern Europe, working through most of 2025. By November and December, tools like OpenAI Codex and Claude Code had improved enough that Tino pushed the team to lean on them harder, and met resistance: people didn’t yet believe AI could outperform them. So he started experimenting on his own, on his own machine, and found he was shipping more than the four-person team combined. By January he’d taken over development himself, despite having no prior background in React, TypeScript, or React Native.
What changed wasn’t that he learned to write the code. He learned the first principles, enough to read what the AI produced and judge whether the structure made sense, then let go of reviewing every line. He points to Andrew Karpathy’s framing of AI as “the animal and the machine”: the AI has no consequences if something breaks, so the human still has to be the one making the final call. His own system prompts instruct the AI to flag ambiguity and check in rather than guess. The bigger shift, he says, is moving from prompting AI toward managing it: measuring progress not by what you type, but by how long the system can run well without you.
Chapters
- 0:00 Meet Tino Triste, Technical Lead & MD of Flutura
- 0:40 A shared hometown: Bolton, UK
- 1:23 Growing up in Portugal
- 2:50 Portuguese Marines: two years that built his resilience
- 7:31 Landing in Bolton and studying product design
- 10:30 Photography, web design, and falling into SEO
- 15:00 How AI lowered the bar for builders
- 18:49 Becoming a non-technical AI-powered developer
- 23:59 Guardrails over control: the Andrew Karpathy framing
- 31:07 From prompting AI to managing it
- 31:52 Inside Flutura: fixing CBT therapy’s paperwork problem
- 38:53 The future of entrepreneurship in the AI era
- 42:02 Where to find Tino and Flutura
Flutura: Ending the Paperwork Crisis in CBT Therapy
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, the NHS’s frontline treatment for anxiety, depression, PTSD, and OCD, runs on paperwork. Tino’s wife has been a licensed CBT therapist for 15 years, and he watched her drown in it: session notes required for every patient, kept for up to seven years, plus homework worksheets she’d dig up from old PDFs and print for each client. Flutura now handles all three: it records sessions and generates CBT-aligned notes, and gives therapists a library of over 200 worksheets and assessments to assign digitally instead of on paper. Clients complete homework on their phones, engagement goes up, and outcomes follow.
Looking ahead, Tino argues the barrier to starting a business has collapsed the same way the barrier to building software has: incorporating a company, once a five-figure exercise in legal fees and setup time, can now be done in days. The risk, he says, is the opposite problem: AI will hand you ten business ideas and tell you all ten are brilliant, and the discipline is in picking one. That reinvention mindset, more than any single tool, is what’s kept Tino moving through every pivot since he first picked up a camera in Portugal.
Tino Triste links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinotriste/
- Flutura: https://flutura.app
- Damask: https://trydamask.com
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