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

Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have an episode that so many of you have asked me for, which is, Claire, if I have literally never written a line of code, I have no idea what I'm doing, I do not know how to run anything locally, how do I get started with AI assisted coding, vibe coding, so I can just learn the basics? And in today's mini episode, I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that or exactly how I would do it, and I'm doing it completely live. So we have a couple hiccups, but we eventually get to a personal project hub 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 or with your team. I hope this is what I'm calling a safe space episode for you to really get started as a beginner using some of these coding tools and learn how to leverage this technology to build interesting things for yourself 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 into How I AI to learn practical ways you can apply AI and make it easier to build. That's exactly why I built ChatPRD. ChatPRD is an AI copilot that helps you write great product docs, automate tedious coordination work, and get strategic coaching from an expert AI CPO. And it's led by everyone from the fastest growing AI startups to large enterprises with hundreds of PMs. 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. And we're integrated with the tools you love, v zero dot dev, Google Drive, Slack, Linear, Confluence, and more, so you don't have to change your workflow to accelerate with AI. Try Chat PRD free at chatprd.ai/howiai, and let's make product fun again. There's this concept I have in teams that I run where we don't call questions dumb questions. We call them safe space questions. And the number one safe space question I still get is, how do I actually get started coding with AI if I have never written a line of code in my life. And we've had a couple episodes kind of giving you one on one on Vybe coding and creating prototypes. We had Lee at Cursor walk through some of the components of Cursor. But still, we have not shown you how to go from zero code, no files, nothing, to a code base that you can start to work on locally and learn a little bit more about these AI assisted engineering tools like HURSUR, like QuadCode, or even just create a little …