The complete beginner’s guide to coding with AI: from PRD to generating your very first lines of code

[00:04] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better [00:11] with these new tools. Today, I have an episode that's [00:14] so many of you have asked me for. [00:17] which is, [00:18] Claire. [00:19] If I have literally never written a line of code, I have no idea what I'm doing. [00:24] I do not know how to run anything locally. How do I get [00:28] started with [00:29] AI assisted coding, vibe coding, so I can just learn the basics. And in today's mini episode, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that or exactly how I would do it. And I'm doing it completely [00:41] live. So we have a couple hiccups, but we eventually get to a personal project hub. [00:47] that can be run locally on your machine that lets you generate docs via AI and prototype designs that you could share just with yourself, [00:58] or with your team. I hope this is what I'm calling a safe space episode. [01:02] for you to really get started as a beginner using some of these coding tools [01:08] and learn how to leverage this technology to build interesting things for yourself [01:13] and eventually for your team. Let's get to it. Today's episode is brought to you by ChatPRD. I know that many of you are tuning in to How I AI to learn practical ways you can apply AI and make it easier to build. That's exactly why I built ChatPRD. [01:28] ChatPRD is an AI co-pilot that helps you write great product docs, [01:33] automate tedious coordination work, and get strategic coaching from an expert AI CPO. And it's loved by everyone, from the fastest growing AI startups to large enterprises with hundreds of PMs.

[01:44] Whether you're trying to vibe code a prototype, teach a first time PM the ropes or scale efficiently in a large organization, chat PRD helps you do better work fast. [01:54] And we're integrated with the tools you love: vzero.dev, Google Drive, Slack, Linear, Confluence, and more. So you don't have to change your workflow to accelerate with AI. [02:05] Try Chat PRD free at chatprd.ai slash howiai. And let's make product fun again. [02:13] There's this concept I have in teams that I run where we don't call questions dumb questions. We call them dumb. [02:22] safe space questions and the number one safe space question I still get is [02:30] How do I actually get started coding with AI if I have never done [02:36] written a line of code in my life. And we've had a couple episodes kind of giving you one-on-one on vibe coding and creating prototypes. We had Lea at Cursor walk through some of the components of Cursor. [02:49] But still, we have not shown you how to go from [02:54] zero code, no files, [02:57] Nothing to... [02:59] a code base that you can start to work on locally. [03:04] and learn a little bit more about these AI assisted engineering tools like HERSR, like quad code, or even just create a little space for yourself to experiment. So

[03:17] Today's mini-ep [03:19] is going to be a building episode. We are going to do it live and there might be some rough edges because I don't have anything baked right now. I'm going to show you how I would do this if I was starting completely from scratch and we will see how far we can get in terms of standing up a little personal app [03:39] on your desktop to code with using AI. And I'm going to try to make this accessible for people who are not software engineers in your day to day. But this is a great episode for software engineers who want to share this with their PMs on their team, designers on their team, or their friends [04:00] to one with coding. [04:02] So caveats here, again, I did not plan this out. So we're doing it live. Two, we are not going to stress out about the quality of the code right now. What we want to start with is can I get something running locally that's useful, that I understand some of the components of, and we're going to do it really fast. It's not going to have tons of functionality, but it's going to get you started. And for everybody listening, I'm going to use a couple tools today. [04:32] - Yeah. [04:32] I'm probably going to prototype a little bit in V0 by Vercel. I'm going to bring it in to cursor. I will show you how to optionally or additionally use Claude code and

[04:47] we might bring in some other exciting tools along the way. So this is one where if you want to get the YouTube up on one side and your screen up on the other and follow along, I will try to make it as simple as possible. [05:02] To get started, [05:03] with nothing, [05:05] and then have a AI coded code base by the end of this. [05:09] We'll see if we can do it 30 minutes. Okay, to get started, I'm going to share my screen. [05:15] And like all good products and like all good founders, I am going to start with writing a requirements document. And we're going to make this really simple. And I thought, what would be a good use case that's pretty accessible to everybody? And I thought this idea of kind of a personal product hub was, [05:36] would be really useful, especially as folks that have followed along our recent episodes with Dennis from Chime about AI powered product management, [05:44] some of our prototyping with cursor episodes with Elizabeth Lynn, I think just like kind of this personal hub where you're going to play with AI stuff is the way to go. So I'm going to say help me write a document chat query. And I'm just going to say personal projects. So it doesn't think I'm working on my own product, a minimal, simple hub. [06:07] for working on two things. [06:10] Oops. [06:11] pressed enter. So it's going to be really anticipate what those two things are. The two things are going to be

[06:21] the documentation PRDs and ideas. The second thing is [06:31] small interactive prototypes. I want a web app with [06:37] basically to navigation. [06:42] items on the left, docs and prototypes. [06:48] And I will turn this into a Next.js app. [06:53] where I can write docs in markdown and find code little prototypes. Okay, so this is what I'm imagining. I'm imagining I'm going to make Claire's hub for product work. [07:07] It's gonna be a super minimal web app. I want docs where I'm going to like basically use AI to write PRDs and other docs and ideas. And then another folder where I write prototypes, [07:19] and maybe show you how to use cursor or these other tools to like five code little prototypes in this folder that then you can see over time and the core audience is myself. So this is just for me. So I can build something simple. [07:38] Thank you. [07:39] You can hear my typing because I have nice nails today. But it's going to write me a quick PRD for my personal project and really outline what I want to do. The reason why I like to start with PRDs is really you just get better results out of the next step, which will be a kind of like vibe coding prototyping step. And so while this is a little bit of time, I think it's really worthwhile to do because

[08:09] not going to be spending so much time on prompting and other aspects of this work. So this is going to generate a PRD. We'll probably like spin through and come back when it's ready and send it over to V0. [08:22] Okay, my document is done. I'm just going to just read the top. I'm going to be the laziest PM. Because again, this is a mini episode, not a big episode. And my general goal, I want to quickly drag down product ideas and markdown format. I want to seamlessly switch between writing PRDs and coding prototypes. I want to organize my documents. I want to see a live preview. Okay, [08:43] Sure, why not? This looks great. So then I'm just going to open this in V0, which is my preferred... [08:50] prototyping app for this particular use use case. The reason why I like the zero for my initial prototyping is one, the UI tends to be pretty like streamlined and nice looking and pretty [09:06] um two it's going to be really easy to take this into the next step of getting it in [09:11] GitHub, getting it in cursor and actually deploying it. And I find that people [09:16] often think that the scariest part is actually [09:20] connecting their vibe coding, um, [09:23] their vibe coding prototype with an actual deployed experience. And I think Vercel's done a nice job, shout out to my friends over there, of setting that up. That being said, like pick your vibe coding platform of choice. Lovable is lovely, Bolt is lovely, Replit is lovely. I mean, all of them are lovely. I'm just going to prefer this one for this workflow, because I'm actually going to pull this into code and show you some alternate ways you can

[09:47] deploy this app at some point. And I know that's a part that a lot of you have questions about or are curious about. [09:54] So it's going to help me build this personal project hub. A couple kind of like keywords for you all as you go down this vibe coding path is... [10:08] Vercel is definitely going to build this in Next.js. So it's going to be JavaScript focused. I always tell people if you're trying to get started with coding with AI, you pick one of two languages, you pick Python, because it's easy to read, or easy to write and read. And you pick JavaScript, because it's easy to see. I don't think JavaScript is actually the most readable language. Python, I [10:34] literally read it and understand what's happening. JavaScript's a little more fancy. Has a couple... [10:42] syntactical things that are pretty unique to that ecosystem. But [10:47] JavaScript, you can like get a website out of which, which we all all really like and there's a couple extra hops and steps with Python. So this is going to generate basically a Next.js app and repository for you that I'm actually eventually not even going to [11:03] use NV0 I'm going to pull in to cursor so you can see here it's a building [11:09] A lot of these components we talked about, again, for people who are like, I have no idea where to start. I downloaded Cursor. I opened it up. What do I do? There really are two steps. You could do this whole step in Cursor start from zero. It will definitely scaffold out a repository for you.

[11:28] But I like for beginners to start in a vibe coding kind of platform like this, because you can really see it first, they have this web based browser that you can look at, you don't have to worry about running it locally. [11:42] And you can really focus on the things that I know some of you non-technical people care about, which is like how it looks and how it works. And then we'll worry about the code. And I feel like something like starting with an IDE, like one server cursor or VS code or whatever, you really start worrying about the code. [11:56] too early for somebody who is not technical. So let's let this generate and then I will come back and show you how I will pull this into cursor. [12:04] this is still generating and one of the things that i want to call out for people again we are doing this live so i'm going to show you exactly the pros and cons of following a flow like this is [12:14] I did make a pretty good PRD, but I did try to tell it to keep it simple. And what I've noticed as a lot of these AI-assisted coding platforms try to take more of the end-to-end application building and are trying to compete on the complexity and completeness of the applications they can generate. [12:44] implementations of these coding tools work than maybe we want. And so again, I wanted it very simple. I wanted a place for my documents. I wanted a place to prototype. I wanted a place [12:57] code, um,

[12:59] I wanted it in Markdown. [13:01] And it's building me a bunch of stuff I don't need. File management, a sandbox. I saw it had a sandbox. [13:11] um for coding like all sorts of things that i didn't actually [13:17] say I wanted and is far beyond, I think, the complexity of the product I wanted to generate for this use case. So we're going to see what we end up with. Otherwise, we'll take a different path. And again, I'm just showing you this so you all can understand the, [13:34] what you're going to get out of these tools and how you may have to back out of a current path in order to find the right path for you moving forward. And so it may have been a mistake to generate this because... [13:52] The app, the VZero app went like ham on the requirements. It built me something very fancy, which is nice, but is maybe beyond what I wanted to start with. So I'm going to see here documents. Okay, we got errors already off to a bad start. Let's go back to the home. [14:10] prototypes, but no, I don't want this. I don't want this code here. I just wanted the code to be [14:15] generated normally so you know what [14:19] This is a bust. And that's okay. Even for a mini ep here, having this be a bust just shows you... [14:27] If you play with these tools, you can figure out the right workflow for you.

[14:34] And then [14:36] It's pretty cheap to walk away. I spent I'm looking at our recording timing. I've spent 10 minutes so far on all of this, including mostly waiting time on loading, and it didn't end up what I wanted. And guess what? [14:49] totally fine. So we're going to back out, we're going to give up on our vibe coding platform, because it's going to take too much back and forth to get to the simple thing I want. And I am going to start this from scratch directly in cursor. Okay, so that was a total bust. We made a PRD, we tried to vibe code it, the vibe coding was way too [15:07] complicated. I don't actually want it to be that complicated for the sake of this quick start tutorial. So we're going to go directly into cursor and see what it looks like in that direction. And so I have opened cursor, it is opened to a empty directory, that directory is actually named Civo, because it's going to be my personal project. There are no files, there's nothing in it. So all you have to do is go into your file browser, [15:35] create a folder that's empty. [15:38] Open that folder in Cursor. And then I want to show a couple of things about Cursor 2.0 that has been released in the last week. One is they now have two different views, an agent's view, which is much more focused on what you're going to build and instructing the agent or multiple agents that are working in your code base. And then an editor view, which is very similar to what Lee showed us in a couple episodes ago, which is your files on your left.

[16:08] files, your code in the middle, and then your chat or agents on the right. [16:14] And I'm actually going to use the agents flow for this because again, I'm trying to get started for beginners and I want to show you how easy it is to run. So I'm going to go to agents and I will. [16:26] zip back to my, I will zip back to my PRD. I am actually just going to [16:32] copy it as Markdown because I'm feeling super lazy. And I'm going to say, I want a very simple Next.js app set up where I can keep... [16:46] repository of Markdown, Docs, PRDs, and [16:52] code in different directories, little, [16:57] prototypes that will be displayed in the app. [17:03] Here is a PRD, but it's super basic. The other thing I'm going to show here is I'm going to use Cursor's new model, Composer1. The reason why is this is a mini app and Composer1 is so cool. [17:17] Freaking fast. It is fast. You guys did a good job there. Of course, you could switch what model you want to use, but we're going to use Composer 1 for the sake of this and see how far we get. Oh, I should also say up here... [17:30] this purity could keep it super basic we're starting from scratch so give me all [17:38] all the steps I need to set up and run this. Okay, so let's see what

[17:46] this cursor agent does, it's going to run a bunch of install files. So it's going to create a next app, it's going to install TypeScript, Tailwind, ESLint, a bunch of stuff, essentially, [18:00] just a couple libraries that will be very useful for you to use. TypeScript will be the typing language and the types will be the types. Tailwind is a really nice CSS library that makes things look nice. ESLint, make sure you write good code. And it's creating the project structure. It's double checking it. It's also installing a couple libraries, including displays of Markdown and [18:30] And it's starting to write a couple pages for me. And so again, look at this thing. It is blazing fast. Rumor on the street is it's a trained Chinese model. So we'll see. [18:43] what kind of non-English language characters. We can force this thing to show up. But why I like Composer 1, again, this is not the most complicated app in the world that we're building currently. [18:55] It is not super fancy. I just want to show you how fast it is. So again, maybe this was the right way to do it for beginners, which is, you know, if your vibe coding tool is just going too far, in terms of how to what features are in your app, just go to cursor and start from scratch and use composer one, it'll keep it very simple. Now,

[19:18] I have in the editor a bunch of files. Does this help any of you that are new to coding? Absolutely not. Do you know what these files mean? No way. Do you want to look at files when you are building an app? No, you want to look at apps when you're building an app. And so you can just really just go into the agent and say, cool, but how do I run this? And it will actually give you the instructions [19:48] Dev runs a local server for your app. [19:52] Okay, and we can pull this up. And now I have running locally on localhost 3001. I have my personal project hub. You can see this welcome document. [20:06] Perfect. This is exactly the level of complexity I wanted. And then prototypes, which is just a little... [20:14] Hello world prototype, I don't actually want the HTML CSS and JavaScript exposed here. So I'm going to go back to agents. And I'm going to say you got this almost right. You got this almost right. But I don't need the code snippets. [20:33] Nibets in... [20:36] the prototype section, I just need to be able to put routes, routes are like page paths if you don't know, routes in this app that I can fill with code components and display to my qualities.

[20:56] So again, it thought that I wanted like a real prototyping tool. V0 thought I wanted a very real prototyping tool. I just want literally a place to show some things. And so... [21:10] It's generating an update. And so now you can create and edit Markdown documents and [21:17] You can... [21:19] show prototypes and routes and let's see if it has improved [21:26] what I want to see is yes, switching storing component code directly in the route files, which is exactly what I want. Again, you don't have to read this code, maybe I'll release this repo and you all can fork it and try for yourself. [21:40] But it's moving very fast to create a second part where I can put some code in. And the reason why I want to do this is I want to show you how you can manage documents [21:48] in a cursor repository like this, and then I want to show you how you can manage code in a repository like this. Again, I am not going to explain to you what this code means. [21:57] You can use the cursor chat to read all the code, explain what it means. We're just going to trust that it shows up in the web app and it's what I want. We're running it locally. There is very little minimal risk here for the most part. It's a pretty simple thing. And so I just want to give you all a couple ideas on how to get started zero to one with something that's really simple in cursor. [22:22] Okay, this is exactly what I want, which is I don't want the app to like let me create prototypes. I literally just want to be able to code them and show them to you all. And so I just have to create directories in this directory in my code base and show them.

[22:36] With documents, it's really cool how it works. So one of the things I would do once this is done is I would say, [22:42] This is... [22:44] exactly what I want. Please explain to me how the two [22:51] user facing functions work. [22:56] and actually put some instructions on the homepage. So [23:02] Again, I'm not going to read the code. We're doing this fast. [23:05] But I do want to make sure I understand how it works. And so it's going to put in some documentation directly in the homepage of my app to explain how it works. So, okay, let's read how documents work. I click a new doc. It creates a marked on document. Files are stored in the docs directory, which is great. [23:25] It can be edited directly in the browser with live preview, which is exactly what I want. And prototypes, I just manually create them in my code editor. [23:33] Any directory I create in the prototypes will automatically appear here. [23:38] And I can create a demo page app and it will go. Now this is exactly what I wanted to start with. Again, about 10 minutes to get this going. And it's a much simpler place for us to start working on our personal project hub. And so while I had a misfire with a vibe coding tool does not work. [24:02] does not really matter. All that matters is that I got to the thing that I wanted to get to. So let's talk about next how I would actually

[24:11] use each of these kind of flows, how I would set up some cursor style rules and agents to kind of manage [24:21] what how my work happens here. And I'll show you how to create a document and how to create a prototype in Vibecode along the way. [24:28] Okay, so I was a lazy girl and did not initialize a GitHub repo. But this is a very important step for any of the technical, non technical folks out there. I know for software engineers get a sort of second hand on how we manage our code projects. But again, this is a safe space episode. So we are going to tell you how to initialize a GitHub repo and what you could use it for. And [24:51] And again, this is an episode for non-technical folks. [24:54] Just use the GitHub desktop app. It will make the primitives of Git in terms of files, change tracking, diffs, pull requests, so much easier to learn if you visually use the downloaded GitHub desktop app versus trying to understand this through the command line. So it's one of these things that, sure, you can have your AI agent sort of like vibe code you commits and things like this using Git in the CLI. [25:24] you understand what's going on in your code. And so we're gonna add this repository to GitHub. I, it is in my projects and it's called Thibos. [25:34] and [25:36] And we're going to create that repository. We're just going to add some stuff to the git ignore file.

[25:43] create the repository. Let's see what's happening. It should be creating this in my GitHub app. And it has and you can see my initial commit has all the original files and then get ignore, which is what files are going to be ignored. [25:58] by git. I'm just going to commit everything and we should be good to go here. We'll see how it goes. You can see how git works by if I added something to this new doc, new headline, saved it, and I switched over into my GitHub repository. You can't see me point at the end to this here. You can actually see this change here. Green means added, red means removed. And as you can [26:28] changes that are happening in your application, I'm actually going to discard those changes. And you can see here, they're discarded here in my code. So now that I have GitHub running, what's great is I can start actually working in this app. And again, if you all. [26:49] don't remember it does sort of two things my app does two things it tracks documents and it helps you create prototypes so we're going to go through how I would set up a personal project hub to do both of these things showing off some of the use cases of um [27:05] cursor and then maybe we'll show a little bit of Claude Cote as well. So... [27:10] If I were creating a personal hub for documentation, one of the things that I would do is actually create some rules. And I would create those rules in an agents folder because I want a documentation agent. And so I'm going to create a new folder called agents. And I'm going to create a new file called prd.md. And that agent is going to create a new folder called prd.md.

[27:41] help me create PRDs. And I'm going to say in this chat, can you fill out P at sign PRD MD, this is a blank file. [27:51] to be agent instructions to write a great [27:56] prd in the, I've mentioned docs, [28:01] See if it's showing the folder. [28:03] in the docs folder. PRDs should be in markdown. [28:09] and the instructions should be less than 500 lines long. [28:17] for our AI agent to flow. Okay. [28:22] So this is just a unique way to define, you know, in cloud code, it's called a skill here in cursor, you can make it a little agent instruction. And what's nice is you can have [28:35] the AI actually created for you. So this is my PRD, writing agent instructions, [28:41] And it tells it who you are, here's the purpose, here's the structure, requirements, etc. Now what I'm going to say is we're rolling solo. I don't need an executive summary because I just don't care about executives right now. And I want my PRDs to be much more functional. So what I would say is [29:00] is [29:01] This is fine, but make the template much more functional around technical requirements versus business requirements for right now for this use case. So again, it's going to refactor this file and give...

[29:21] some improvements on the template and you will see those improvements be shipped into this file. And then what I'm going to use is I'm going to use this file to then write PRDs. [29:33] moving forward. [29:36] You can see it's going very, very fast. I'll let it finish up and I'll show you how I'd use it. [29:41] Okay, so this agent file is done and you can see here it gives it a role, some core principles on its purpose, a PRD structure, and then it should give at the end if it's a good agent a checklist of steps to follow. And so this is just going to be additional instructions that I'm going to be able to feed into cursor when I write. [30:06] a PRD and [30:08] This is saved in this agents folder. This is where I like to put my instructions. Just a really easy way to add much of them keeps them organized and you can create as many of these as you want. Okay, so since I've written this code, I'm just going to bop over to GitHub Desktop and see that that code was added. And then I'm going to commit this, [30:27] to main. Don't tell the engineers. We're just going to commit to main today. I will talk about branches another day but today we're just committing to the main branch because I'm just running this locally. And so I'm going to commit this agents PRD and I'm just going to select this file and say create PRD MD. That's a perfectly fine placeholder. Commit. [30:47] And now that code has been committed to my repository. Now, what's really nice about this is if I go on my history, I can actually undo the commit, I can amend the commit, I can do a bunch of stuff. And this just lets you check in step-by-step the changes you've made to your files.

[31:03] Okay, and then how would I use this agent? So really easy, I would say, great. Now write me a PRD for [31:15] What do we want to prototype today? Oh! [31:18] I'm working with my kid. So this, again, it's a very personal repository. I'm working with my kid on helping him do gardening and like weeding and sweeping work for our neighbors in the city. And so I'm going to do help me write a PRD for a little scheduling thing. [31:39] app where my kid can have our neighbors schedule help with [31:46] Weeding, taking out trash cans and sweeping their dragways. Okay, this is very important stuff. And what it's going to do is it's going to read that PRD markdown file that agent instructions and then cursor can actually follow that. [32:06] those instructions to create a document in the right [32:10] Folder. [32:11] And the reason why I give this example is, of course, you could just straight write a PRD [32:16] in that docs folder or yes of course you could use some other template but what i really like is just showing you how you can define a workflow in agents reference that workflow and then use that [32:30] to create different assets in this code base that we've created zero to one. So now I have this neighborhood task scheduler PRD.

[32:39] Very cute PRD here. Now the magic will be, will it show up in our app? And I think the answer is... [32:48] "Yes, let's refresh." [32:50] Neighborhood Task Scheduler PRD. Here in the app, I can actually read it here, see how it looks. It's very long. This is too long for a solo founder. So what I might do is go back to that agent's PRD and add a step that really reduces. [33:13] the length of those documents. Okay, so what's the benefit of something like this? Not only can I have this nice little web app, where my PRDs are displayed, I can store those PRDs or documents in a local code repository that I can edit with AI directly with cursor or whatever my AI preferred code is, I can create an agent that gives instructions on how to actually create those [33:43] I [33:43] over time, [33:45] And I can do code and change tracking to see when I added new documents and how I added them. And so [33:54] While this may seem like... [33:56] overkill, you could just do a Google Doc or something like this. I think this document creation and storing and display workflow is a really nice one for anybody looking to get started with coding with AI, but needs kind of a practical application. And what I can imagine product managers do with this is start to just brainstorm in cursor. The reason why I think it's

[34:26] a way to understand a little bit more about how these tools actually work, get more comfortable with these code editors. And then as you move into more code experiences, you then kind of have a sense of how all these tools work. And so just to resummarize this piece of the app, we've created half of our personal Project Hub app, it displays documents that we store in this documents folder [34:56] agent to actually create those documents which is defined in this PRD Markdown file. Next, we're actually going to code so I'm going to show you how to code something like this, show it in the front end and then we'll put a couple bows on the end and send you off at the end of this little episode. [35:15] Okay, great. So I've created a PRD with for a little scheduling app for my kid, where he can have his neighbors schedule help with weeding, taking out trash and sweeping their driveways. Now I want to build a prototype for how this works. And if you recall in my original requirements and in the web app, the instructions basically how it works is I'm going to create routes, which are little sub directories or folders of functionality. [35:39] inside the prototypes page. And it will show up here in this list for people to see. Now I'm giving a simple, silly example. But what you can imagine is at work, you could start to create just a repository of your own prototypes that you're playing with that you're looking at, and you're learning to code with. So I'm gonna go back in cursor.

[35:59] And now that I've created this PRD, I can say great, use this PRD to create a prototype. [36:11] but does not have to be totally functional [36:17] with database, et cetera. [36:20] in the prototypes folder, [36:24] so that I can show a little of how this might work. [36:29] super simple, easy peasy. Again, I want to make it a prototype. I don't want cursor to go off and like ask me to set up a database or any of those silly things. I really just want to create a clickable prototype. Again, I think this is a tip or trick for the product managers out there. When you're creating your own local repository, like you can avoid stuff like figuring out auth, you can avoid stuff like figuring out databases, especially if you're just trying to use this for [36:59] exact example I'm going to give. So I'm going to let [37:02] It run. [37:03] It's going to build different files in you can see it created prototypes, task scheduler, [37:11] It's creating a page, I'm going to keep all those changes, I'm going to bop over to the web app, [37:16] I'm going to refresh. I see task scheduler in here right now. [37:20] And it has a sign in. [37:24] I don't know how this works. So I'm going to ask the chat. Do I sign in with something? How do I sign in?

[37:33] And it's probably going to tell me just to click the button. So... [37:37] Use any email and password. Perfect. Easy. So I'm going to do [redacted email] and password. And I can see that the text is gray. I'm actually take a little screenshot of this bad boy to fix later. [37:52] Oh, OK. And then we have neighborhood tasks and you can create a task. [37:57] you can see all the different tasks. This is exactly [38:01] what I wanted. So again, it's not the prettiest app, it's probably not the best code. But if you're just trying to get started with how do I start to use cursor in real code to drive value, I want to skip these vibe coding tools, I want to go straight to the code. [38:19] I can actually see this and understand that. [38:25] how this tool might work. And then I can go back and forth in cursor and explain to it what I want, how I want it to be fixed, all that kind of stuff. And so I'm actually going to drag that screenshot in [38:37] and say it seems like fields have great text, please fix. And I can go back and forth and iterate on this code. If I'm feeling fancy, I can actually go into the code itself. I can read it, I can ask cursor to explain this code again. [38:57] I'm just trying to give you inspiration as a non-technical person, how you could use something like cursor really to do very basic things in code, but that have high payoff in terms of what you see

[39:09] and what you learn. [39:11] And so let's see if this fixes our little login. [39:15] We're going to side out. Oh, look at that. Now it's fixed. It looks so much better. So we're really happy with our prototype. And you can imagine now you can just go into cursors to say create a new prototype in a new folder, and it will create it for you. And again, of course, we're going to go to GitHub. We're going to check in. [39:35] scheduling, prototype, [39:38] and commit its main. I'm going to publish this repository in [39:44] my personal repository, I'm going to call it personal [39:49] project, hub, [39:51] and publish it, that's just going to push it to the cloud. [39:54] So you have a place to access it online. It's not just local. And let's see, it's all looking so much better. So I'm really excited. [40:03] happy with this. Now I'm going to show you a couple other things that I might do [40:08] in this app to make things better one I'm going to start a new agent and say can you update the readme for this repo the readme is generally like the front page instructions and walkthrough of how the repository works so I highly recommend when you get to a starting point or a stopping point with your functionality [40:31] to update. [40:33] Your README file, this is something that agents as well as other engineers could use to understand how your

[40:40] and so this is going to tell us what the features are, how to install it, [40:45] what all the files are that we created, how to use it, etc. And that was created in just a few seconds. So that's something I highly recommend. And then again, we want to just go ahead and commit these readme changes. The second thing that I would probably do here is make it look nicer. So I think we're going to wrap this mini episode with Claire's guide to making things look [41:09] nicer, [41:10] in cursor, we'll see if we can do this in just a couple minutes. So I would start a new chat here, again, we're gonna use composer, it's fast, we like it. [41:18] And we're gonna go back. I don't actually care about the prototype looking nicer. I care about this homepage looking nicer. This is really, really, really sad. So [41:28] I'm going to open cursor. I'm going to say I don't like the baseline design of the home [41:38] page of this app. Please up level the design to be [41:44] prettier [41:46] and cuter, rename it to, let's call it, [41:52] Sevo personal hub and make it less basic. Again, terrible prompting, but we're going to see what it does. It's going to review the homepage. I think prettier and cuter is great instructions here. So we're going to see what I end up with when I prompt it to look a little bit nicer. Oh, it's going to be a cozy workspace for documents. This is amazing.

[42:19] I don't know, it makes me happy. It's stupid looking, but it's cute. And so again, when you're working on something [42:27] locally, [42:28] Who cares? Make it fun. Make it creative. Play with stuff. Add dark mode. All those things. I love it. You know I love a gradient. You know I love a pink. I'm going to check in these changes. I'm going to call it pretty and cute and call it a day. So this was my walkthrough of how to create zero to one. [42:51] A code base that helps you consolidate documents, including PRDs, and helps you build out prototypes. And I think this is just a really good baseline repository for anybody, especially product managers who are wanting to get started with protocols. [43:07] writing using something like a cursor and coding using something like a cursor. [43:13] And again, you can continue to extend this, add more prototypes, add more documents, and get started. So what were our steps? We created a PRD in chat PRD. We attempted to send that PRD to v0.app. We got way too much functionality. It was too smart for its own good. So we started all over. We created a clean folder on our desktop. We opened that folder in cursor. [43:43] things. Then we created an agents file to write our PRD documents. And then we vibe coded or AI assisted coded our first little prototype that also gets displayed in this app.

[43:57] We made it prettier. We added a GitHub repository. We checked in our code and we added a readme. So I hope this was the safe space episode you all were looking for. I get asked for it. [44:10] all the time. And if you have never written a liquor code in your life, [44:16] I hope this gives you a place to get started. [44:18] playing with your own personal space. There are lots of other episodes of How I AI that can feed into this workflow. This is just a good one to get started. And I hope you've enjoyed this mini episode of How I AI. Thanks, y'all. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. [44:40] You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.