Vibe coding — day 1

For the past few weeks I kept thinking about finally stopping the talk about what AI can and can't do in programming, and actually trying to build something "on my own."

Over the weekend I put together a paper manual/handbook called "programming with AI" to finally prepare for launching my first solo online project using an AI-native tech stack.

Essentially, I spent several hours talking to Claude Opus 4.6, asking how to start coding with AI, what tech stack to pick, how to install everything, set up hosting, connect a domain, use GitHub, and what a repository even is.

He explained, and I kept asking, digging deeper, trying to make sense of it all.

I asked about the best possible AI tech stack. Plus a dead-simple, explain-it-like-I'm-five guide on how to use all these tools, with a glossary of several dozen terms at the end (including what HTML is, what a commit is, pull request, git, GitHub, library… there's quite a lot of it… let's say I'm taking a very school-like approach. Back to basics. :)

And so the manual came together — over 30 pages. I printed it out, started reading and following it step by step, asking Claude about everything along the way.

What I got done on day one, in a few steps

1. Buying a domain: Cloudflare — enough of home.pl… I went with the extravagant nowosielski.ai, mainly because other combinations of my name were already on company hosting and I didn't feel like using those.
2. Hosting: Vercel — gives off a strong AI/startup vibe. Still had to sort out DNS etc.
3. Installations: git, Node.js, Cursor IDE, Claude Code — had to do it from the Mac terminal, which wasn't the easiest thing for me, especially since I'd never launched stuff like this before, except maybe when I accidentally hit some random key combo.
4. GitHub account — stores code in the cloud, manages versions (I still don't fully know what that means), and serves as the source for Vercel. What's more, everything connected so that I got automatic deploys from GitHub.
5. Launching Cursor on Mac and connecting all these tools together (Vercel, GitHub, Cloudflare) — turns out they're already so well integrated that everything basically works with a single click.
6. Creating an "initial prompt" defining what I want to build — which Claude also helped prepare. I described what sections I want on the site and what it should be — in short, just a homepage.
7. Dropped that initial prompt into an agent running in Cursor — this was actually funny, because I was a bit hesitant to paste it in for the first time and see how it all works. It took a few good minutes, but it spat out the first version of the site. I pushed it a bit with changes, then learned my first commands: git add + git commit with a description of the change + git push to send it off.
8. At this point I finally connected the live domain to Vercel. Waited a moment and nowosielski.ai went live.
9. My first commit appeared in my GitHub repository under the profile piotrek_nowy.
10. I tweaked the site a bit — played with the visual layer, moved columns around, changed the font, simplified the concept, and at the end added a blog section — but without Supabase yet. And that wrapped up day 1. 5.5 hours total.

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I'd call it a successful and fairly smooth start. I don't understand much about the tools I'm using, but thanks to AI it went like reading IKEA instructions for a moderately complex piece of furniture.