Welcome

Learning objective

By the end of this lesson, you will know what this course is, who it's for, what you'll have built when you finish, and how to move through Module 0.

Why this matters

Most coding courses promise too much and deliver something close enough to feel like a win without being one. Knowing what you're signing up for — what you'll build, what it costs, and where the hard parts are — is the difference between finishing and quitting partway.

Core read

This course is Ship Your First Thing: a self-paced course for people who have never written code and want to build a real product anyone on the internet can visit. By the end, you will have built a small social app — sign-up, profile, posts, follows, feed, comments, likes — running at a public web address.

You won't write the code. An AI coding agent (a program that reads your project files and writes code on your behalf, based on a conversation with you, → GLOSSARY) writes it. Your job is to say what you want, look at what came back, and say what should be different. That skill — noticing when the AI got it wrong and steering it back — is what this course teaches.

The course lives on GitHub (a website that hosts code projects — where a project's saved versions live, on a page of its own on the internet, → GLOSSARY). You can read it there, or on the course site, which shows the same lessons and tracks your progress.

This course is for you if:

• You're comfortable using a computer.
• You've never written code, and code intimidates you a little.
• You want to build something real.

It is not for people who already write code for a living — it will be too slow for you.

What you'll have when you finish:

• A working social app at a public web address.
• Real fluency in working with an AI coding agent: asking, checking, recognizing wrong output, recovering.
• A few durable habits — saving your work often, testing with two sign-ins, knowing what your tools cost — that carry over to whichever AI tool you use next.

What this course is honest about:

• AI tools change every few months. When a lesson's steps no longer match what's on your screen, the steps shifted, not the skill.
• Both paths have a usage allowance that can run out on a busy day and make you wait. One costs about $20/month, one is free to start. Lesson 3 helps you choose.
• You will get stuck. The course expects this.

Note: Seeing something different from what this lesson shows? On the course site, open the lesson chat ("Ask about this lesson") and tell it what you see versus what the lesson says — it can help you reconcile the difference against this exact lesson. For the full record of changes, see WHAT-CHANGED.md.

How to move through this course:

• Module 0 gets your tools set up, and its last lesson has your agent build a page that's yours — in the same sitting.
• From there, follow the practical route that lesson gives you: save your page properly (Module 2, Lesson 3), practise the loop (Module 3), then build the real app (Module 4). Module 1 explains what's underneath; read it when a build points you there.
• Do the exercises. Reading a lesson feels like knowing it. Doing the exercise is knowing it.

Exercise

Five minutes:

1. Know that two cost paths are coming — one about $20/month, one free to start, and both can ask you to wait on a heavy day. Don't pick yet; Lesson 3 walks you through it.
2. Look at the list of Module 0 lessons in the module README, so you know what the next five lessons ask of you.

Checkpoint

You've got this if you can:

• Say what you'll have built when the course is done.
• Name the two cost paths in one phrase each.
• Say where you'd look first when a lesson doesn't match what you see (on the course site, the lesson chat — "Ask about this lesson").

What you just did

You took five minutes to learn the shape of the course before installing anything. "What am I getting into?" before "what's the next button?" is the closest thing this course has to a motto, and you'll use it before every request you make of your agent.