I have worked in high tech for 30 years, building products for public companies and training thousands of software engineers to be productive.

In 202,  I have tutored 331 hours with tutor middle school, highschool, college students in computer science.

My most recent students are adults who are not computer engineers but they want to use tools  such as Cursor, Windsurf, Claude code to build websites and apps because they have an idea and they heard that Vibe Coding is possible for them.

One such example is someone who wanted to build a desktop app to take an image and the app will do automatic dimensioning.  Within an hour I helped him install and setup Claude Code.  We launched Claude Code inside of the terminal and I guide him to first create a product requirements document (PRD) for the product he wanted.

Then I asked him to prompt the AI agent to create an engineering implmentation plan. Given these two documents, AI has all the context it needs.

The next prompt is to just to use ‘@’ to mention the implementation.md file and after just two prompts to following the @implementation.md, my student had a fulling working Python GUI application that will do automated edge detection and create a measurement overlay.

The level of quality after only 2 prompts using Claude Code surprised even me who has been been using Claude Code for over 5 months on a daily basis. 

If you are someone who is thinking about building a custom app for yourself, here are my suggestions

1) Use Claude Code, $20/ month is well worth the cost

2) Build something that you will use every day, otherwise you will not have the motivation to continue

3) Be ready to spend at least 40 hours prompting and learning about the capabilities of AI coding and more importantly the limitation

4) My rule of thumb is that it will take you 40 hours to build a small app, 80 hours to build a medium size app. 

Keep building!