🚀Your First App in 10 Minutes

Open your AI builder of choice and start a fresh project. Don't pick a template — templates short-circuit the part of vibe coding you most need to practise: turning a vague idea into a concrete prompt. A blank canvas is the whole point.

Before you type anything, take 60 seconds to picture the finished app in your head. Who uses it? What is the one thing they do? What does it feel like? You're not designing — you're just naming the vibe.

A great opening prompt has four parts: the user, the outcome, the visual tone, and the constraint. Skip any of them and the AI will guess — usually wrong. Include all four and you get something close to usable on the first try.

Don't pre-optimise. Don't ask for auth, payments, and a database in the first message. One outcome, one vibe, hit send.

Once the AI produces something, resist the urge to rewrite the prompt from scratch. That's the single most common beginner mistake — every rewrite throws away what was already good and rolls the dice again.

Instead, send a small follow-up that names what to keep and what to change. This is called a diff prompt, and it is the workhorse of every vibe coder.

Every change you make from here on follows the same tiny loop. You'll run it dozens of times in a single session. Eventually it becomes muscle memory.

Now we add favourites. The instinct is to ask for 'favourites with localStorage persistence and a delete button' in one message. Don't. Three small prompts beat one big prompt every time, because each step is reviewable and reversible.

Add the favourites list. Confirm it works. Add persistence. Confirm it works. Add a delete button. Confirm it works. Three minutes of patience saves twenty minutes of debugging.

Sometimes the AI will get into a loop: every fix breaks something else. Don't fight it with longer prompts. Instead, do one of three things.

First, undo to the last good state. Most builders have a history — use it. Second, describe the bug as a user, not as an engineer: 'When I click New Quote twice quickly, the old quote flashes back for a second.' Third, if it's truly stuck, ask the AI to explain the relevant code in plain English. The act of explaining usually surfaces the fix.

Click publish. Copy the URL. Open it on your phone. Send it to a friend. You shipped.

The first publish is always a little embarrassing — that's the point. Shipping early is what separates people who finish projects from people who polish forever.