If you’ve used ChatGPT before, you already know the pattern: you ask a question, it writes some code, you copy that code, you paste it somewhere, and you hope it works. That’s a chatbot. It’s useful, but it never actually touches your computer — every step of getting its answer into a real, running project is still on you.
An AI coding agent is a different kind of tool. It runs on your own machine, it can read every file in your project, it can make changes directly, it can run commands and see what happens, and when something breaks — which it will, constantly, for everyone — it reads the error and tries again. You’re not copying and pasting anymore. You’re talking to something that’s actually sitting inside the project with you.
That difference is the whole course. Every lesson from here on assumes you’re working this way: describing what you want in plain English, watching the agent build it, and learning to read what it did well enough to steer it. By the end of Chapter 1 you’ll have a real website live on the internet, built this way, that you can point people to.
You don’t need to know how to code to start. You do need to install the tool, which is what the rest of this lesson walks through.
quiz — UI demo, not yet wired to grading