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Building with AI

Building an app with AI when you can’t code

You don’t need to become an engineer. You need to know enough to steer.

Start small. One idea, one screen, one thing it does. Describe it to the AI the way you’d describe it to a friend — plainly. It scaffolds, you run it, you look at what’s wrong, you tell it. That loop is the whole job.

“Vibe coding” — just accepting whatever the AI hands back — gets you further than you’d think. It gets you a working screen, then two. It stops the moment something breaks and you can’t say what broke. The AI can’t see your screen. If all you can offer is “it doesn’t work,” you’ll both go in circles.

So the skill isn’t syntax. It’s being able to describe the shape of the thing: this list, that button, this saved here. You don’t write the code — you understand what it’s trying to be, enough to catch the AI when it drifts.

Two habits that pay off

• Keep changes small. One thing, run it, confirm it, move on. A big pile of changes that “should work” is how you lose an afternoon.
• Make it prove itself. “Show me it saved” beats “did it save?”

That’s it. The tools do the typing. You do the deciding.

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The full playbook — every screen, in order — is in the guides.