What you can build, and how to describe it

A few years ago, making a small website or a custom tool meant learning to program. Today, you can describe what you want in plain language and let AI write the code. That doesn't make you a developer, but you can build real, useful things.

What's within your reach

• A small website: a club's page, a portfolio, a restaurant menu, a wedding announcement.
• A tool for yourself: a quote calculator, a kitchen timer, a household chores planner, a unit converter.
• An automation: a small program that renames hundreds of photos, merges spreadsheets or sorts files by date.

What remains a profession

An application that handles payments, user accounts, health or client data, or that has to cope with lots of visitors: there, AI helps, but you need a professional to check the security. Start with projects where a mistake only costs a bit of time.

The tools

Three families, for example: a chat assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Le Chat…) that gives you code to copy; a code editor with a built-in assistant (such as Cursor, or VS Code with Copilot); platforms that build an app from a description (such as Lovable, Bolt or Replit). To start, a chat assistant and a single file are enough.

Describing what you want

AI codes what you describe, not what you imagine. Before asking for a single line of code, write a few sentences:

• Who it's for and what it's for: "a tool to split costs between flatmates".
• What it does, from the user's point of view: "I enter the expenses and who paid, the tool says who owes how much to whom".
• What it doesn't do: "no account, no online saving".
• What it looks like and where it runs: "a single, simple page, readable on a phone, nothing to install".

Then end with: "Before writing the code, ask me the questions you need answered." The AI's questions often reveal what you hadn't thought of.