Build Your First Web App

Who This Guide Is For

You've seen the posts on Twitter/X. Someone shares a screenshot of a web application they built over the weekend. The comments are full of excitement. Then you read the words: "I just described what I wanted to Claude and it built the whole thing."

And you think: I could do that.

But then you try. And immediately hit a wall. The AI gives you code, but... where do you put it? The tutorial mentions "pushing to GitHub" — what does that mean? Someone says "just deploy it to Cloudflare Pages" as if that explains anything. You Google "how to deploy a website" and fall into a rabbit hole of conflicting advice, outdated tutorials, and assumed knowledge you don't have.

This guide is for you.

You're comfortable with technology. You use Canva, Mailchimp, maybe QuickBooks. You've probably written some basic HTML at some point. You're not afraid of computers. But you've never used Git, never deployed to a server, never touched an API key, and the developer ecosystem feels like a foreign country where everyone speaks a language you almost-but-don't-quite understand.

What This Guide Is NOT

This is not a coding tutorial. This is not "Learn JavaScript in 30 Days." You won't write much code yourself — that's what AI is for.

This is the guide that explains the ecosystem. The accounts you need. The tools you install. The concepts you need to understand. How everything connects. It's the prerequisite knowledge that every vibe coding tutorial assumes you already have.

Think of it this way: AI can write the code, but you need to know where to put it, how to save it safely, and how to get it onto the internet. That's what this guide teaches.

Chapter 1: The Moment We're In (And Why You're Reading This Now)

It's February 2026. Something unprecedented has happened, and most people haven't noticed yet.

For the first time in history, non-developers can build and deploy real, functional web applications. Not toy projects. Not limited prototypes. Actual software that does useful things, runs on the internet, and works reliably.

Three things converged to make this possible:

What "Vibe Coding" Actually Means

In early 2025, Andrej Karpathy — one of the original OpenAI researchers, former Tesla AI director, and generally one of the smartest people in the field — coined the term "vibe coding." He was describing his own experience: writing software not by typing code character by character, but by having conversations with AI, describing what he wanted, and letting the AI generate the implementation.

By January 2026, he posted an update that should make you sit up straight:

"I really am mostly programming in English now."

This isn't a random influencer making bold claims. This is someone who could hand-write neural networks from scratch choosing to describe what he wants in plain language instead. The tools have gotten that good.

Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic itself, shared something even more striking: "Pretty much 100% of our code is written by Claude Code + Opus 4." The company building the AI is using the AI to build the company.

The Gap This Guide Fills

Here's the problem: AI tutorials assume you have developer knowledge. Developer tutorials assume you don't have AI. Both leave you stranded in the middle.

When someone on Twitter says "just have Claude write a contact form and deploy it to Cloudflare," they're assuming you know:

• What files Claude should create
• Where to save those files
• What Git is and why you need it
• How to get files from your computer to GitHub
• What Cloudflare is and how deployment works
• What an API key is if your form needs to send email
• How to keep secrets out of public code

That's a lot of assumed knowledge. And if you don't have it, you can't even get started.

What You'll Be Able to Do

By the end of this guide, you'll understand the complete pipeline from "I have an idea" to "it's live on the internet." Specifically, you'll be able to:

1. Describe what you want to build to an AI tool
2. Save the generated code properly using Git
3. Push your code to GitHub where it's stored safely
4. Deploy automatically to Cloudflare so it's live on the internet
5. Iterate by having more conversations with AI and repeating the cycle

The first time you push code to GitHub and see your site update automatically on Cloudflare... it never gets old. There's something magical about describing what you want in English, and then seeing it exist on the internet minutes later.