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Claude Code for Founders
The specification system, end to end, on a real project. The one I would send someone who has ten minutes and is sceptical.
- Free · by email
- [PLACEHOLDER: free course delivery: how many lessons, and over how many days they arrive by email]
Afterwards
What you will be able to do on Monday.
The test is not whether you enjoyed it. The test is whether your next brief comes back executable.
Almost everyone who tries an AI coding tool has the same first experience. You type what you want in a sentence, the way you would ask a person, and you get back something that runs, looks roughly right, and is wrong in a way that takes longer to unpick than to rewrite. Most people conclude the tools are for engineers and stop there. I did.
What changed was treating it as an extremely fast, completely literal contractor with no memory of yesterday and no ability to ask a clarifying question, rather than as a search engine with a magic answer in it. This course is that shift, taken apart and put back together on a real project, so it takes you an hour instead of the months it took me.
- Write a brief an agent can execute without you babysitting it
- Set up CLAUDE.md so context survives between sessions
- Recognise the four failure modes before they cost you an afternoon
Fit
Who this is for, and who should not bother.
The second card is the one worth reading.
Take it if
You can see the whole product and cannot build it
Founders · operators · solo builders
You have run something, written briefs for humans, and made peace with never being the person who writes the code. Every idea you have goes into a queue, the queue is other people, and the queue is always full. This course is the thing that gets you out of the queue, and it is aimed squarely at you.
Skip it if
You already write production code for a living
Engineers · technical leads
You will find the first half obvious and the second half slightly patronising, because you have been asking for real specifications since the day you started and nobody gave you any. The vibe coding page is a shorter read and makes the same argument without the hand-holding. Send this one to whoever writes your tickets.
Syllabus
Five modules, one real project running through all of them.
You finish with something that works, not with notes about something that would.
01
Why your first attempt failed
The four failure modes, named, so you can see each one arriving rather than diagnosing it after an afternoon is gone. None of them is a model problem. A one-line instruction has always produced one-line-quality work; we only stopped noticing because humans quietly fill the gaps, and then resent you for it.
02
The brief, part by part
Constraints, edge cases, the file it goes in, what done means, and the list of things it must not touch. Each part is here because something broke without it. You write one for a real task in this module and watch it execute, which is the only way the difference stops being theoretical.
03
Context that survives the session
The agent has no memory of yesterday. CLAUDE.md, project structure, and the small amount of setup that stops you re-explaining your own product every morning. This is the module that turns a good afternoon into a repeatable week.
04
Reading the diff
What to do when the output is wrong, which is not a longer prompt. Repairing the specification instead of the code, refusing work you cannot account for, and the checks that let a non-technical person do that honestly rather than nodding at green ticks.
05
Where this stops
The decisions that still need technical judgement, the ones you should not make alone, and how to recognise the point where the honest answer is to hire an engineer. Every course that leaves this module out is selling you something.
Delivery is by email: you sign up on the newsletter page and the lessons arrive from there.
What comes with it
- Every specification template used in the lessons, in plain Markdown you can paste straight into a repository
- One worked example carried through all five modules, from an empty folder to something running
- The four failure modes as a one-page checklist you can keep next to you
- The CLAUDE.md starting point I use on my own projects, with the reasoning for each section
- A short reading list, including Andrej Karpathy’s original vibe coding post from February 2025, so you can see where the term came from
No card, no upsell sequence dressed up as lesson six.
The limit
This will not make you an engineer.
It will make you able to specify work precisely enough that something else can execute it, and able to tell when what came back is wrong. That is a real skill and it is worth an hour. It is not the same skill as engineering, and you cannot ship a production codebase with zero technical judgement; nobody can, and anyone selling you that is selling you something.
It is also not vibe coding in the sense Andrej Karpathy meant when he coined the term in February 2025: fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists. The method here is the opposite of that. Write the brief, read the diff, know what you accepted. The distinction is not pedantry: it is the entire difference between the two outcomes.
Free, delivered by email, and the honest test of whether the paid courses would be worth anything to you.
Free
[PLACEHOLDER: free course delivery: how many lessons, and over how many days they arrive by email]
What free costs you
An email address and about an hour of attention. Delivery is by email, so you are joining the newsletter list to receive it, and one click removes you from that list whenever you want. There is no card and nothing in the sequence is an advert wearing a lesson as a disguise.
Before you sign up
Three things people ask first.
Is this vibe coding?
I have never opened a terminal. Is that a problem?
Why is it free? What is the catch?
Start
An hour, and no card.
You will know inside the first lesson whether this is a different thing from what you tried before. If it is not, unsubscribe and you have lost an hour rather than a fee.
P.S. The next time you get bad output, do not rewrite the prompt. Write the brief you would have handed a contractor who cannot ask you questions. That is module two, and you can do it this afternoon without me.