You - person with zero programming experience - are going to teach yourself Claude Code today

Today is the best day ever to start learning new things. And to show you that I am actually not going to teach you anything, I’m going to give you the tools to teach you yourself how to use Claude Code.

Here is how it works: Below you will find a list of terms and concepts to learn about. I’ve given you prompts to get started, but you can also write your own. Use your AI of choice to learn what they mean and how to do things. If you think you got it, move to the next item. By the very end, you will have taught yourself how to make a simple web app that runs on your computer using Claude Code in the terminal.
I strongly recommend using a Mac, but if you must insist in using inferior systems, you can get AI to help you run this on a Windows machine as well.

If you already know about something, skip that!

Why Claude Code?

Programmers at the company that you’re working at today are writing code and directly committing that code to a greater code base. Using Claude Code, you will be able to do the same thing.

So even though you might today be able to make apps using something like Lovable, you cannot actually modify the code that your company is making, and this will allow you to do that. So it’s useful to do this.

Now, there’s a big downside to using Claude Code for little vibe-coded apps, which is that you have to figure out deployment—as in, where do you put the code so that it keeps running other than your own personal machine. But for today, I’m just going to give you a taste of Claude Code rather than teaching you how to deploy and manage an app in the cloud. That’s okay. You don’t need to learn that today.

Instead of Claude Code, you can also use Codex CLI by OpenAI. Everything will work the same way.

There is some metaphore here. Leica M4, shot on expired film from 1999

Cooking with Claude Code

Okay, we are going to make a little application that runs on your computer where you can enter what you have in your fridge and then it will give you recipes.

1. Web app. Teach me what a web application is, what frontend means, backend means, what the database does and how these pieces connect. Also teach me the concepts of running something locally vs. “in production” or “in the cloud”.

2. Terminal. Teach me what the “terminal” or commandline. What is it for and can you give me step-by-step instructions that make me create a folder somewhere on my computer? Make sure I have the tools necessary to easily navigate in the terminal.

3. Install Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code and create an account (if you already have one, use that!)

4. Now create a directory in your home folder and call it something fun

5. Run Claude claude

6. Now tell Claude what you want to build! Here’s a nice prompt that will get you something cool:

   1. Build me a web app that allows me to choose ingredients that I have in my fridge/house and then suggest recipes based on that. Remember what ingredients I have in house by storing that in a database. Make sure to see the database with a lot of different recipes and make it possible for me to add new recipes with ingredients. Also, create a Makefile that makes it easy to run this app locally by just typing make run. Make a plan first before starting to work on this. Then use sub-agents to work in parallel on different features at the same time and start work.

7. Let Claude cook for a while, make sure to allow it make to changes while it’s doing it. You can set permissions to always accept by running claude with claude —dangerously-skip-permissions, but the name says it all. Run that with caution.

8. When Claude is done, you should be able to run make run in your terminal and see your app in your browser (probably by going to localhost:8000). If you’re stuck, you can just ask Claude for help!

Next steps

Congrats, you built your first app using Claude Code!

What you can teach yourself next:

• Versioning, and specifically Git. This is a toughy to crack, but crucial for contributing code! Ask your favorite AI this to learn it:

  • I know nothing about versioning or Git. Please tell me the fundamentals and teach me how to use Git day-to-day and how to, for example, clone an open source project and how to make contributions to something like that.

• Deployment: how do you actually get your app in front of the world. Here’s a good one you can run in the folder you just used:

  • Now, how would I go about deploying this? What services are available to me to be able to make this available to other people on the public internet?