Building useful tools without a coding background. Chris Black's hands-on hour — half the room had never tried vibe coding before. By the end most of them had a working game in the browser.
Programming is now done in English. Vibe coding isn't about learning to code — it's about directing AI to build the thing you want, instead of wrestling with it. The 101 is chat-driven prototyping inside Claude Cowork (or Lovable): describe what you want, watch it build, iterate. The 201 is connecting that prototype to your real systems — calendar, CRM, Slack, Excel — through MCP connectors and APIs. Chris demoed the 101 with a themed snake game (built in under 60 seconds) and the 201 with a calendar-to-tax-spreadsheet automation she runs personally.
The shift in posture matters more than any tool choice. Vibe coding isn't a skill you study — it's a way of asking.
If you can articulate what you want, you can build it. The same instinct that turns a brief into a project plan turns a sentence into a working tool. Twenty years of "it takes weeks to change a button color" is gone.
"If we can think it, if we can articulate it, we can vibe code."
The output won't be perfect on the first pass. That's the point. Treat the AI like a junior dev — give it the goal, the colors, the constraints, then iterate. Don't try to write the code; tell it what good looks like.
"None of us are experts. None of the tools are experts. So know that we're going to play a lot today."
Chris kept reminding the room: this is experimentation, not production. Build silly things first. Build a snake game. Build a register game for your kid. The skills you develop on toys port directly to the work that pays.
Lovable, Cowork, Claude Code, Bolt, Replit — they're all moving. Pick one that works for you, ship something, and don't get overwhelmed by the rate of change. The patterns transfer.
"What you're learning today will work with everything that comes up."
The Claude Cowork desktop edition. Chris's live walk-through: open Cowork, type a sentence, watch the thing appear in the preview panel within 60 seconds.
Once your prototype runs, the question becomes: can it touch your real systems? The 201 is about connectors — making your vibe-coded tools actually do work in your business.
Chris was deliberate about saying "I'm ethically non-monogamous about my LLMs." Here's the working triage.
| Tool | What it's best at | When Chris reaches for it |
|---|---|---|
| Lovable | One-click publishing to a real URL, beautiful UI defaults | Anything you want to share — community games, mini-tools, sites your team or family can actually use |
| Claude Cowork (desktop) | Chat-driven prototyping, connectors (MCP), works on a work-locked laptop | Personal-use workflows, calendar/email/file automation, prototyping you'll keep iterating on |
| Claude Code (CLI) | Deeper, repo-aware, production-grade workflows | "The grown-up version" — once Cowork stops being enough. Pavilion course coming on this. |
| GenSpark | Slide creation with fonts and colors you actually want | Decks. Chris's favorite slide tool — produced her February deck from scratch. |
| NotebookLM | Visual generation from documents, creative slide content | Pulling structured visuals out of source material to drop into a deck. |
Two things came up that point past this class.
Chris is presenting at Andy's last-Friday-of-the-month AI & GTM meetup on token management — a Chrome extension she built to monitor usage, plus a menu-bar app for API spend. Both vibe-coded.
"The grown-up version" of what we did today. Pavilion is working on a future course; in the meantime, anyone fluent in Cowork can start exploring Code with the same patterns.
Worth exploring for visual work, but maxes out quotas fast — tracked separately from your main chat budget. Andy promised a deeper look at this in a future session.
Class 5 is Scott Wueschinski's Operations: Power Prompting for Revenue Teams — the move from prompts to skills. These quick wins set you up for it.