How to Build Apps with Claude Code as a Complete Beginner
I’m not a developer. I’m not a coder. I have a design background and code has always scared me.
But Claude Code has pretty much completely changed things for me. It’s let me build stuff I never would have been able to do on my own.
What you need to get started
Just the Claude app. That’s it.
You don’t need to touch the terminal. You don’t need a code editor. When you open the app, go to the Code tab. That’s where everything happens.
From there, start a new session, choose Local so it runs on your machine, then pick a folder. Everything you build gets saved in there.
For the model, I use Opus 4.8. It’s incredible. It builds what I ask, designs the way I want, and handles pretty much everything I throw at it.
Building a to-do app from scratch
I wanted to show how fast you can go from nothing to something working.
I typed: build me a minimalist to-do app. Card-based design, option to tick off items, strike through completed ones, move them to the bottom automatically. Show me a preview.
That was it. Within a few minutes it had built the app and was showing me a live preview in the same window. I hadn’t done anything. It just did it.
I then asked it to turn it into an actual app rather than just an HTML file. A couple of minutes later, done. I could add tasks, tick them off, watch them move to the bottom. A real, working app. In under ten minutes.
If you want to go deeper on AI — in-depth guides, news, and breakdowns of the tools actually worth using — we create all of that over at OffUltra. Worth checking out.
Building a World Cup website with live scores
I wanted to push it a bit further.
I asked it to build a dark-themed World Cup website showing live scores, previous results, upcoming games, and flags.
It built something. The design was really good. Way better than I expected from one prompt. But it was using sample data it had made up, so I asked it where I could get a real free API for live football scores.
It gave me three options with a breakdown of what each one does well and what the limitations are. It recommended footballdata.org as the best balance of free, reliable, and easy to set up.
So I made an account, got an API key sent to my email, and went back to Claude. It asked me which API I’d gone with so it could write the right script. I didn’t even have to tell it first.
When it gave me instructions I didn’t understand — there was a CP command it mentioned — I just asked it what that meant. It explained it clearly. Copy a file. That’s all it was.
It walked me through opening the .env file, pasting my API key in, and starting the server. The website was now pulling live data. Upcoming matches, today’s schedule, finished results going back days.
I noticed the finished scores were showing oldest first so I asked it to flip them. It changed it instantly. Latest scores at the top.
Working on a real product
The demos are one thing. But I’m using Claude Code on a live membership website that’s part of my actual business.
It’s digitalcreatorclub.com. I’ve been building it all year, adding and refining things every week or so. It pulls data from a Supabase database and connects to Stripe. It’s a proper product.
A couple of recent changes I made with Claude Code:
I’d sold out of two membership tiers and needed to remove the £149 one from the homepage. I asked it to remove that row. It did it live, right in front of me. Done.
On the manuals page, content is locked unless you have a membership. There was a locked button under each piece of content and I didn’t like how it looked. I wanted a padlock icon on the thumbnail instead, top left, and a Members Only pill with a dark background replacing the text.
I described that. Claude figured out which part of the codebase to change without me having to tell it. It scoped the changes to the right component, made the updates, and it looked exactly how I’d pictured it.
What I’ve built with it
I use Claude Code every day. Across a few different projects.
digitalcreatorclub.com is the main one. But I also built offultra.com with it, my personal website, and I’m constantly making changes and adding things to all of them.
The to-do app and the World Cup site were just quick demos. What I actually care about is that it’s useful for real, live projects. And it is.
One tip if you get stuck
If Claude gives you an instruction you don’t understand, just ask it what it means. Treat it like a conversation.
I do this all the time. I don’t know what half the commands mean. I just ask. It explains. That’s it.
You don’t need to pretend you understand something you don’t.
