How I Created An Application in 3 Weeks With Zero Coding Experience Using AI

I coded an app with AI in just three weeks without any development experience. Below I’ll share my experience and some takeaways from building the application…

First, I’ll start this off by letting you know that although I’m not a developer, I have hired developers and had apps built for me or a company I was running since 2011.

Because I’m not a developer, I’m sure there’s going to be some developer or engineer reading this post saying, “But what about this, that, that, and that?” or they’ll say, “Technically, it’s this, this, and this.” …

And the thing is, they are probably right. However, when using AI, it can clean up a lot of the stuff for you. Yes, there is some basic knowledge you need which I’ll provide below. However, most, not all, developers are not the greatest people to learn Vibe coding from because they know too much.

It’s not that they don’t know how to, or that they’re not good. It’s that there’s a lot of things that are basic to them that are advanced to us. Most are just too far removed from having zero coding knowledge. But there are some who are great at teaching. So I don’t want to generalize for all developers.

Developers are useful if you’re building something complex, or if you want to pay someone to review everything to make sure you don’t have any big issues with your application once you’ve gotten the ball rolling with some customers generating you money.

Also, I made a ton of mistakes on this journey. I won’t declare myself an expert after doing this one time. However, I will say that with what I know now, I have a better process, and I would’ve probably built the same features in just one week.

I’ll start with the tools I used, and then give a loose guide on best practices and what it takes to build an app using AI without any coding knowledge.

The tools I used were Cursor, Wispr Flow, GitHub, and DigitalOcean. I’ll quickly explain what each tool is for…

Wispr Flow – Is an AI voice app which allowed me to talk my way through coding instead of having to type. It saved me loads of time, and I’m actually using Wispr Flow to create this very post So I apologize now if there are any typos because I’m not going to edit this that thoroughly lol.

Cursor – Cursor is what they call an IDE. Which is a fancy word for the software you would use to actually write the code.

GitHub – This is a code repository. Basically, this is where you back up your code and also keep a history of the different features you’re building. I’ll explain the importance of this later.

Digital Ocean – This is basically a hosting account that allows you to make your app live so people can access it from the internet.

Now let’s get into a little more depth…

The most important thing you need to understand is that coding with AI does not mean you don’t have to think. It just means you don’t need to know how to code or read code…

With that said, if you’re willing to be organized, put in some effort and follow what I say below, I truly believe that anyone can do it…

The most important step to this entire process is planning out exactly what you want the app to do. If you don’t spend the majority of your time in this planning phase, you’re going to be in a world of pain and pulling out your hair. This step is crucial and unavoidable, especially if you don’t know how to code.

You don’t need to understand programming lingo or be fancy. You just need to spend time thinking things through.

The way I do it is I visualize exactly how I want the experience to be from the moment a user logs in to my application. The first question to ask yourself is when someone logs in, what do they see?

Typically, the first thing someone’s going to see is your main dashboard. At that point, you’re just envisioning what they see on that main dashboard. Is there a screen with data? Is there a form? Is there a “Get Started” button, etc.?

Then you need to think about what navigation menu items there will be for the core features. Then from there, you go feature by feature. So for example, when they click on the first navigation menu item, they get brought to another screen. What is on that screen?

Then, at that point, you just walk through in your mind the functionality that you want in the features that you want.

You do this for the entire apps core features.

Then after that, there are some basic things that most production apps need:

– A registration process with or without payment.
– A log out functionality.
– A database schema (this is where your app’s data gets stored).
– Security.
– Tests. This helps make sure your app doesn’t break easily.

AI will help. You figure out what else your app needs, but you do want to make sure these components are there. Most apps will need all of these.

Once you’ve mapped everything out in a document, you feed that document to AI and explain that you want to make this application and need it to architect it for you. Let it know you’re not a developer, and you’ll be using Vibe Coding. Let AI know what vibe coding tool you’ll be using, and tell it to make you a technical document.

Be sure to tell AI to give you opinions and suggestions on features you can add, how things can be implemented, if things should be done differently. etc.

Once you get the core features down, you want to ask AI to provide you a technical stack that works best with the tools you plan on using. This is important because certain tech stacks work better using AI coding.

Once the technical document is finished, take that document and run it through a different AI service. I typically start with Gemni 2.5 Pro and then use Claude 3.7 Sonnet as the second AI service.

Once the technical document is completed, you go back to your original AI service and ask it to create a product requirements document. This document is going to be a lot more detailed with more technical information that your IDE or code editor will need.

Once you have the product requirements document completed, put it into your secondary AI service and ask it for its opinion on improvements, changes, etc.

From there, you tell AI to create a step-by-step tasks list That you can feed to your IDE or code editor so that it can keep track of everything it’s doing.

Once the task list is complete, you ask AI to provide you a vibe coding plan for the tasks list.

Now you have all the prompts you need to build out everything. This post is already getting kind of long, so I don’t want to get into the actual using the IDE or code editor here, but hopefully this information is helpful to you.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them on my Facebook post here…

If you want me to go into a little bit more detail, like how much I spent using the actual code editor and actually showing off the app that I built, let me know on the Facebook post above. If there is enough interest, I’ll put something together.