Zara Zhang

Last weekend I held an event that's the opposite of a hackathon. No competition, no pressure, no pitches. Just people who love vibe coding, vibe coding together. Audience was half technical, half non-technical. Everyone made new friends, got new ideas, and learned something. Planning to do this more!

Content is becoming more like product, and product is becoming more like content. A good piece of content should have a clear target audience & value prop, just like a product. A good product should have a clear opinion & be extremely sharable, just like good content.

7 lessons I learned on how to effectively work with coding agents: 01: Context, not control Give the AI context about what you want to achieve, then let it figure out how. Don't micromanage the steps; describe the destination. It's smarter than you think, and often smarter than your specific instructions. 02: Push until it breaks Don't accept the first result. Keep pushing, asking for more, requesting variations. Push it until it fails at something. Only then do you truly understand its limits. The limits are further than you think. 03: Put in the reps There's no magical prompt template or shortcut that will suddenly make you an expert. Like everything else in life, you just need to put in the reps. The more you build, the better your intuition becomes for what works. 04: Try everything. Waste tokens. Do playful experiments. Do things that would seem like overkill. Try silly ideas. The best discoveries happen when you're not being sensible. Tokens will get cheaper over time. Curiosity is the real currency. 05: Build in public The best textbook is Twitter, and the best teachers are people who are slightly more advanced than you and share their work openly. Share your progress, even the messy parts. You'll learn faster and find your people. 06: Make it fun There have been times I've literally chuckled at Claude's output. It's charming, creative, and genuinely surprising. Lean into the joy. If it stops being fun, you're probably being too serious about it. 07: If you can talk, you can vibe code Don't be intimidated by the terminal. If you can articulate what you want to build, you can vibe code. The hardest part isn't the coding. It's coming up with something worth building, and making people care once you've built it.

Hey Claude Code, can you build a webpage that visualizes how the different technologies in my codebase talk to each other, like in a group chat This is actually extremely entertaining and educational at the same time

As someone who's not technical, - 12 months ago I could only make simple demos that looked nice but didn't work - 6 months ago I could make prototypes that fully functioned on my computer, but not for others - Now I can ship a simple product end-to-end for thousands of users, including auth & payments At this rate, what will be the ceiling 6/12 months from now? We have to internalize the rate of change, not just the status quo. If you tried vibe coding and it didn't work out for you, try again.

𝖫̶𝖾̶𝖺̶𝗋̶𝗇̶ ̶𝗍̶𝗈̶ ̶𝖻̶𝗎̶𝗂̶𝗅̶𝖽̶ Build to learn

Just shipped my first vibe coded product end-to-end, and here are the 8 SaaS that I used: AI coding: Claude Code Database: Supadata Deployment: Vercel Emails: Resend Domain: Namecheap Data analytics: PostHog Auth: Google sign-in Payments: Stripe

99% of questions that people encounter while vibe coding can be answered with "just ask the AI"

This 20-min presentation, "Code as a Medium for Storytelling", is an encapsulation of all my recent thinking on vibe coding as a non-technical person I also showcase 5 projects I built (all of which were viral on X), and 7 lessons on effectively working with coding agents

The playground plugin in Claude Code is very handy when used together with Huemint for exploring color palettes Just go to Huemint, generate a bunch of combos, and send the links to your favorites to Claude. It will be able to fetch the color codes. "These are some color palettes I wanna explore. Fetch the color codes and use playground plugin to let me visualize how each palette would look like"

The best way to learn coding right now for non-technical people: - Skip the courses/bootcamps; go straight to try building something with an AI coding agent (Claude Code/Codex) - When something doesn't work, ask the agent - If agent can't fix it, get it to do deep research on the Internet - If that still doesn't work, ask a developer friend - Rinse and repeat

Products are becoming the new essays. When you build something, you're encoding your beliefs into how it works. AI tools let anyone turn their opinions into actual products now. It's self-expression, just in software form instead of words.

Created a custom slash command "/handover" in Claude Code: When I'm ending a Claude session (e.g. context window filling up), I get Claude to generate a "http://handover.md" document which summarizes everything we did in this session, including decisions, pitfalls, lessons learned, etc. So the next session's Claude has full context. This prevents amnesia and preserves institutional knowledge

Introducing Excalicord: a video recorder built on top of the Excalidraw whiteboard - Record yourself & whiteboard at the same time - Beautiful backdrop & cursor highlight - Invisible teleprompter for your script Built by me & Claude Code (this is the first product that I shipped end-to-end without an engineer) Try for free: excalicord dot com

I've been thinking about why so many people aren't using AI to learn new things. It's not that the tools aren't good enough. It's that we're still looking for the old structures: the syllabus, the expert instructor, the curated textbook. But AI fundamentally changes what's possible. You don't need to wait for someone to teach a course on exactly what you want to learn. You can have a patient tutor explain concepts in ten different ways until one clicks. You can ask the "dumb" questions you'd be embarrassed to ask in a classroom. The barrier to expanding out of your intellectual comfort zone used to be access. Now it's just willingness to embrace a new mental model: everything is learnable, and you don't need anyone's permission to start.

A great and low-barrier way to get started with vibe coding: Ask a coding agent to turn all kinds of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files into beautiful, interactive html webpages

One of the hardest part of building a product: how to convey the value prop of the product to first-time users Every user comes with these questions in mind: "why would I need this?" "what does this do?" Most products don't answer this well in the first 60 seconds This is esp important for products that embody new concepts. How do you convey "here's a whole new way to do X" in a very short period of time? I personally really dislike onboardings that force me to read a bunch of screens. Lmk if anyone has seen innovative ways of doing this

Trend I'm seeing in the Valley: the latest AI-native startup teams are all building their own internal tools, 100% customized for their needs, instead of buying SaaS. Do not dismiss these as vibe coded slop. They are built by professional internal developers dedicated to building internal tools, sped up 10x by AI.

How to turn an hour-long YouTube video into a polished article that you can read as an ebook (EPUB): (One prompt only, no code needed) 1. Go to anygen dot io 2. Paste in prompt below 3. Download EPUB file

I'm spending $200/month for Max mode in Claude Code. For $200, I get a senior engineer who is available 24/7, readily brings all my ideas to life, never gets tired or impatient, and teaches me coding along the way. It's the best deal ever