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You don't need to know anything. You need a tiny job.
The blocker isn't coding. The machine writes the code now. The blocker is "I don't know what to build."
So we'll fix that part first.
Five shapes that work the first time.
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A small gameThe snake game from your childhood. Tic-tac-toe with weird rules. A card game your family plays. Whimsy is allowed.
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A dashboard you check weeklyYesterday's Nifty close from Yahoo Finance. The weather where your parents live. Your IPL team's fixture list. The Mumbai air quality index.
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A learning pageMultiplication drill for your child. SQL flashcards for a colleague. Marathi vocabulary for yourself. A quiz that nobody else has built because nobody else has your exact problem.
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A repeatable scrapeA page you visit every week just to copy three numbers off. A court hearing list. Your bank's IFSC lookup. The school's bus timings page that's somehow still on a PDF.
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A summary you'd hate to write by handYour week across five WhatsApp groups. Yesterday's news in five lines. A 90-page PDF in three bullets.
Pick one. Just one. The smaller, the better.
Open claude.ai. Paste this.
One file. No build step. No npm. Just HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
Make it look good on my phone too.
Swap [the thing] for your tiny job. Claude will produce a working artifact right in the conversation. Click the preview to see it run.
Don't like the colours? Ask. Want a chart? Ask. Want it in Marathi? Ask. Keep going until it looks like the thing you imagined.
The artifact lives inside Claude. You want it outside.
Click the copy button at the top of the artifact. Paste the code into a file on your desktop called index.html.
Double-click that file. It opens in your browser. That is your app, running on your machine. No server. No login. Yours.
Pick a rung. You can climb later.
Netlify Drop. Drag your file onto the page. Get a link. Send it.
Sites disappear in 24 hours unless you make a free account to claim them. Good for showing a friend the thing you just made.
Cloudflare Pages. Sign up, click "Create" → "Direct Upload", drag your folder. Stays forever. Unlimited bandwidth. Your own subdomain.
GitHub Pages. Make a public repo, drop the HTML in, turn on Pages. Custom domain free. Edits go through git. This is how grown-up sites work.
Don't skip rungs. Start lazy. Climb if you keep at it.
Only when the first one starts to feel boring.
Say your dashboard should show yesterday's Nifty close every morning at 9am. The shape is always the same: a script + a schedule + somewhere it can run.
Two free paths to that "somewhere":
Val.town. A web tab where you write a tiny script and set a cron line. 100,000 runs a day. Free. No GitHub, no terminal. Your script lives in the browser.
GitHub Actions. A YAML file in your repo runs your script on schedule and commits the result back. Free forever for public repos.
One trap: if the repo sits untouched for 60 days, GitHub silently disables the schedule. Push any commit — a typo fix — every couple of months and it stays alive.
For "make it smart" — summaries, tagging, drafting captions — you need an LLM API. Two free, no-credit-card options:
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"Get API key" → Gemini. Highest quality model you can use without a credit card.
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Same shape, fastest inference on the planet. Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek-R1, Whisper.
Paste the key into your script — never into the HTML page itself, because anyone visiting the page can read it. If you're unsure: ask Claude. It knows the difference.
It will. Here's what to do.
Paste the error message back to Claude. Tell it what you saw versus what you expected. Most things fix in one round.
If it gets confused, start a fresh conversation. Paste your working version. Tell it what you want to change. Long conversations get sticky. Short ones don't.
You now know more than ninety percent of the people who've ever said "I should learn to code."
The rest is practice.
I went from simple stuff to complex stuff in months flat. Here's how the path bent →