Reopen the Kitchen

Welcome back. First Kitchen ended with you shipping a project of your own choosing. Dinner Service is about what comes after: an app that other people actually use. Ten lessons from now, something you built will be taking notes from real guests and remembering them — and at least two of those guests won't be you.

If you haven't cooked First Kitchen, this course assumes you have — the moves from those ten lessons get used here without re-explanation. It's free, and this course will wait.

One loose end first. In Lesson 5 we made you a promise: local saves today, cloud later. Your save points still live only on your machine — which means your project is exactly one spilled coffee away from gone. Today, "later" arrives.

What you'll plate today

A brand-new project, opened the way a professional opens a kitchen: house rules written from memory, save points from the first minute, and every save mirrored to the cloud — proven with a fire drill.

Ingredients

• A free GitHub account — email only, no card. Make it now if you don't have one; two minutes.
• A new empty folder called dinner-service, opened in VS Code
• About 30 minutes

Cook

1. Open the kitchen from memory

New folder, terminal, claude. Then — before building anything — set the project up the way First Kitchen taught you, but this time you dictate it without looking anything up:

New project. Set it up properly before we build:

1. Create a CLAUDE.md with my house rules. Here they are: [dictate
   from memory — your announce-first rule, your design taste, your
   save-point reminder. If you blank, peek at your first-kitchen
   folder — but try memory first.]
2. Set up save points, and make the first one: "kitchen opened".
3. Add a README.md with two lines about what this project will be:
   a comment card box — a small app where my guests can leave me
   a note, and I can read them all in one place.

That last line is the course's dish, revealed. A comment card box: the simplest possible app that listens, remembers, and gets read. Every lesson from here builds a piece of it.

2. Give your saves a home in the cloud

Here's the move you've been owed since First Kitchen:

I have a GitHub account. Put this project's save points on GitHub
as a PRIVATE repository called dinner-service.

- If you need me to log in or click anything, tell me exactly what
  to do and wait for me.
- When it's done, give me the link to my repository and explain in
  two lines what happens to my saves from now on.

A browser window will likely open for a one-time GitHub login — same energy as the Cloudflare login in Lesson 6. Approve it. From now on, the ritual you already know — "make a save point" — gets a second half: the save also travels to a vault that isn't your laptop. (The full story of why professionals never skip this lives in our git recipe.)

Open your repository link and look: your CLAUDE.md, your README, sitting on the internet — private, visible only to you. That's not publishing. That's insurance.

3. The fire drill (do not skip)

Insurance you've never tested is a rumor. Test it:

Fire drill: pretend this laptop just died. Clone my GitHub
repository into a fresh folder called dinner-service-rescue,
next to this one. Confirm everything arrived — CLAUDE.md, README,
save history. Then delete the rescue folder and confirm we're
back to normal.

Watch it happen: your whole project, reborn from the cloud into a folder that didn't exist a minute ago. The next time a laptop dies on you — and one will — you'll remember this drill and order it for real, calmly.

4. Update the ritual

One rule to close the loop:

Add a rule to CLAUDE.md: whenever we make a save point, also send
it to GitHub without asking. Saves live in two places now.

When it burns

• "I don't have a GitHub account" — github.com/signup, free tier, no card. The username becomes part of your builder identity — pick one you'd say out loud.
• A login window never appeared — ask: "show me the exact login link or command you're waiting on." Sometimes the terminal prints a one-time code to type into the browser; the agent will point at it.
• It asks about something called a "personal access token" — say: "use the simplest official login flow and walk me through it." You should end up in a browser clicking Authorize, not copying secret strings around.
• PRIVATE vs PUBLIC — double-check the repository says Private on GitHub. Public is for the day you choose it, not a default you discover later.
• You blanked on your house rules in step 1 — that's a finding, not a failure: it means the rules lived in the file, not in you. Read your old CLAUDE.md once, then dictate. They'll stick this time.

Order up

□ A dinner-service folder with CLAUDE.md, README, and save points
□ Your repository is on GitHub — and it says Private
□ The fire drill ran: cloned, verified, cleaned up
□ CLAUDE.md now says saves go to the cloud automatically

Quietly notice the difference between today and First Kitchen's Lesson 1: nobody showed you a screenshot of what to click. You dictated a setup from experience. That's what graduate means.

Next up — Lesson 02: Plan the Menu. A comment card box is too big to cook in one order. Time to learn the move that makes multi-day projects possible: making the agent plan before it cooks — and follow the plan one step at a time.

Stuck on a step? The question box below reaches us directly — a step that lost you is a hole in the lesson, not in you.