I've been out of the coding game for years. I mean, I was a CSS czar at Intuit back in the day - built their responsive grid system, wrote Bootstrap articles that got millions of views, but somewhere along the way I drifted into pure UX leadership and stopped building things with my hands.
This week I decided to change that. I spent two days getting fully onboarded with Claude Code (which I now call "The Brain") and documented the entire journey.
In this episode, I walk through everything: installing Node, setting up the dev environment, connecting GitHub, deploying to Netlify. The whole enchilada. I built a working app called the Electric Monk: a worry tracker inspired by Douglas Adams where you give your worries to a digital monk who holds them for you.
But this isn't a vibe-coding demo. I'm not just talking into a mic and watching magic happen. I'm showing a human-in-the-loop workflow where I see every file, understand every decision, and direct the architecture. The AI is my hands, but I'm still the brain.
By the end of the two days, the app had Google OAuth, Supabase database persistence, AI-generated responses to worries using Claude's API, and a dynamic mood theming system that changes the entire UI based on how you're feeling emotionally.
I also did a side-by-side comparison with Lovable to show the difference between getting a pretty facade versus getting something you can actually own, debug, and hand off to a team.
This one's for designers, researchers, product people - anyone who's been told they "can't code" but knows they could if someone just showed them the path.
This guide will take you from zero to running your first AI-built app locally. By the end, you'll have a complete development environment and the ability to build web apps with Claude Code as your AI pair programmer.
Step 1: Open the Terminal app on your Mac (no idea on Windows, sorry!)
Cmd + Space to open SpotlightStep 2: Check if you already have Homebrew installed
which brew