Your First Dish

Lesson 1 ended with a page that said your kitchen is open. True, but it was a test plate — nobody keeps it. Today you cook something you might actually keep: a one-page site about you.

And you'll learn the one prompting move that separates people who get generic results from people who get their results. It isn't a magic phrase. It's making the agent ask you questions first.

What you'll plate today

A single index.html — your name (or alias), what you're about, links you care about — that looks the way you wanted, because the agent interviewed you before cooking. This exact file goes live on the real internet in Lesson 6, so we're not making a throwaway.

Ingredients

Your first-kitchen folder from Lesson 1
About 30 minutes

Cook

1. Open the kitchen

Open VS Code with your first-kitchen folder, open the terminal, type claude. Same as last time — this opening move becomes muscle memory around Lesson 4.

2. Order the interview, not the dish

Here's the move. Beginners describe a thing vaguely and get a generic thing back. The fix is delegating the questions too. Paste this:

We're building a one-page personal site: who I am, one line about
what I do, a few links I care about, and a section for what I'm
learning right now.

Before you build ANYTHING, interview me — ask me up to five short
questions, one at a time, to pin down the content and the mood
(colors, serious or playful, calm or loud). Then build it as a
single file called index.html and open it in my browser.

3. Answer like you're talking to a person

It will ask things like what should the header say? and warm tones or cool? Answer in plain words — "warm, like a bakery" is a perfectly professional design spec in this kitchen. Two notes while you answer:

You don't owe the internet your legal name. An alias is fine; this file is local today, but Lesson 6 makes it public — decide as if strangers will read it, because they will.
Don't overthink. Every answer is changeable in one sentence later — that was Lesson 1's whole point.

4. Watch it cook, then taste

Approve the permissions, let it build, and look at what opens in your browser. It's probably 80% right — which is the normal and correct outcome of a first pass. Pick the single thing that bothers you most and order the fix:

The links look like a plain list — make them feel like buttons
I want to press. Then refresh it in my browser.

That 80%-then-adjust rhythm isn't a workaround. It is the craft, and next lesson trains it properly.

When it burns

It looks generic anyway — your mood answers were probably abstract ("nice, modern"). Re-order with texture: "warm cream background, one bold accent color, big friendly type." Specific in, specific out.
It made three files instead of one — say: "Combine everything into a single index.html — one file only for this project, remember that." (Foreshadowing: Lesson 4 makes it remember for real.)
It wrote way too much text about me — "Cut every section to at most two sentences. I'd rather be brief than impressive."
The browser shows the old page — refresh, and if it's stubborn, hard refresh: Ctrl+F5 (Windows) / Cmd+Shift+R (Mac).

Order up

Check the pass:

□ index.html exists in your first-kitchen folder
□ The page shows YOUR content, in a mood you chose
□ The agent asked you questions before building
□ You ordered at least one change after seeing it

The skill you actually cooked today: you stopped guessing what to specify and made the agent extract it from you. Use that interview move on everything — it works for sites, tools, trip plans, and everything else this course builds.

Next up — Lesson 03: Taste, Adjust, Repeat. Five deliberate changes to this page, including one deliberate disaster and a rescue. It's the confidence lesson.

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.