Give your first AI coding project a finish line

By Evgenii Arsentev

A first coding project needs a finish line. "Build me a useful app" leaves too many decisions floating around: useful to whom, doing what, and with which information? Before opening an AI coding tool, write down one thing a person should be able to do when the project works.

Consider a small tool for comparing workshop dates. The first version might show three sessions, let a visitor filter by day, and display a contact address. That is enough to inspect. Accounts, payments and a calendar integration can wait. Adding them to the first request makes it harder to tell whether the basic idea is any good.

The brief does not need special vocabulary. Describe the visitor, the content you already have, and the limits. Say whether the dates are examples or real entries. If you have a folder of images, identify it. If you have no photographs, ask for a layout that works without them. Otherwise an attractive empty box can quietly become someone else's job to fill.

Here is a starting request: Build a page for a weekend drawing workshop. Show three sample sessions, a day filter and an email contact. Use readable text and a simple layout that fits a phone. Keep the sample data in one clearly named file. Choose the colors yourself and explain how to preview the finished page locally.

Notice the permission to choose colors. Small decisions should not require another conversation, but boundaries still help. You can allow local edits while reserving publication for your review. "Finish the page" and "publish it on my domain" are seperate actions; state which one you mean.

For another way to assemble that brief, my guide to writing a first Claude Code build prompt groups the request around the goal, context, examples, standards and room for the tool to make decisions. You can use those headings as scratch notes, then turn them into an ordinary paragraph.

When a preview is ready, click through it yourself. Try a filter with no matching sessions. Read the contact address. Shrink the window. A completion message is not evidence that every interaction works, and a screenshot cannot show what a button does.

Keep the next request focused on what you observed. "The day filter hides all sessions when I choose Saturday; the sample file contains two Saturday entries" gives a much better starting point than "it is broken". Save a copy before bigger changes too. Its a small habit, but being able to return to a working version makes experimenting much less tense.

Evgenii Arsentev builds web products with AI agents and writes practical guides for people learning to use them. His work includes a free Claude Code course for beginners.