AI Development Guide [free download]
Once you are comfortable using Claude and ChatGPT for work, the next step is to start thinking about how to use AI tools to solve broader internal or customer facing problems by building something - a repeatable prompt or a mini-application - that can be used consistently to solve that problem in future.
Until the arrival of AI, for most non-technical people and non-technical teams this is where you come to a stop.
You don’t have the skills to build anything yourself
The problem is not expensive or frustrating enough to warrant paying an external agency or pulling your own dev team of your product roadmap
And so finance teams continue manually manipulating spreadsheets
HR teams continue sharing interview updates on email
Business teams invest in expensive SaaS that doesn’t quite do what they want it to do
Build your own POC
Today, with the advent of tools like v0, Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, Windsurf and Replit - non-developers can get a long way, even the entire way, to building out a workable prototype.
Enough to prove that you can solve the problem in a consistent way, and to provide a detailed requirement to a development team to productise it.
To help you on this journey of discovery, I have pulled together an AI Development Guide.
AI Development Guide
Go from non-developer to POC using AI as your partner
It is written for you assuming that you have zero development experience, but are curious about these new tools, keen to learn and happy to bump up against a few walls as you gain more experience.
The guide walks you through these steps:
Define your goal
Not every solution needs to be a functional application, maybe just a reusable prompt would be sufficient.
There are a number of possible solutions we might come up with:
A prompt for a one-time use
A prompt for ongoing repeated use
A mini-application for internal use on a local machine
A mini-application for internal use via a browser
A mini application for external use via a browser with no login
A mini application for external user via a browser with authentication
A module/feature to be integrated into a larger existing application
Understand the problem
You might be solving a particular problem that you face in your role, or perhaps it is one faced by other members of your team or your customers.
You want to get your detective hat on and detail the problem in excruciating detail, such that if you explained the problem (and how it is manually solved today) to a new intern with no knowledge of your company they would be able to follow your instructions and solve it.
Solve ‘the thing’
Next you’ll want to explore how to solve the crux of the problem using Claude or ChatGPT as your partner. There is no point building a fancy user interface if you haven’t figured out a way to solve the problem repeatedly.
Here we are using AI as our co-developer to help us think through the problem and consider different approaches to solving it - with a prompt, a script, a piece of code.
Create a Product Requirements Document
Having solved ‘the thing’ we can now start to think of what this looks like as a product. ‘Product’ is a big word - we don’t necessarily mean a paid product on the internet. It could be a customGPT or shared prompt available to your team, a mini web app for your team or customers to use, or it could indeed be a full product.
Whatever your path, we need to define the goals of the product, who will use it, how they will access it, technical considerations and a high level project plan. I’ll introduce you to a tool called ChatPRD that can help you here.
Map out the user interface
Next up we need to define what screens we will need in our application - will users need to login, will they have a profile, will they see results? We’ll use your PRD and the description of ‘the thing’ to ask our AI partner to define which screens we’ll need.
For each of those screens we’ll then define what needs to be on them - components, text, input fields, buttons.
Build the pages
It is only now, that we have solved ‘the thing’, created a PRD, mapped out all of the pages and their content, that we can start building our solution.
If it is a simple prompt of customGPT then we probably have already solved our problem. If we are building a simple web app for internal or external use then this is where we get our hands dirty.
You will likely use a tool called v0, or Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Windsurf or Cursor to do this.
It is a fast moving space with each of these products building out new features daily so it is risky for me to point you in one direction over another.
At the point of writing if you have zero design or development experience then try v0 or Lovable - these are low code and I think you’ll learn a lot as you interact and bring your product to life.
The key for each of these tools is context, and this is why we’ve spent so much time defining the problem, solving ‘the thing’, writing the PRD, and defining the UI and screens.
As you create a project in any of these tools you will upload what you have created as context - this helps the tool to build exactly what you have in mind without a lot of rework.
As you build, be sure to demo to the potential users of the tool (if that is not yourself).
“Here’s what I have, how would you use it, what would you click next, does that give you what you need….”
Use their feedback to iterate quickly and get to a point where you have a workable solution.
Advanced (ask for help)
Its at this point, where even the most eager learner is likely to start hitting some walls.
Maybe with adding a database, or authentication, maybe with more complex workflows or adding an AI element.
(When I was building my first product Kowalah using these tools I literally had weekends where I was sobbing to my wife “I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m out of my depth” before going for a run, coming back and fixing the thing I was stuck on.)
It is at this stage that I typically move over to a more advanced tool like Cursor, or where you start bringing in your development team or an agency.
The point is, that you are not sharing with them a high level problem or idea (wouldn’t it be great if….)
Instead you are sharing a working prototype that you have exposed your potential users to and that you have in principle confirmed meets their needs.
Grab the guide
The AI Development Guide is available as a Google Doc template so that I can keep updating it as I learn more and the tools develop.
Bookmark the page, or make a copy to edit and make it your own.
There has never been a better opportunity to be a non-developer building things than today - dive in!
Get Started
Whenever you are ready there are three ways I can be helpful:
Model 101 Playlist: 20 minute guides to using ChatGPT, Claude, NotebookLM for work
AI Inspiration Briefing: Show your people the path forward in this 60 minute live session
Kowalah: Buying platform to help you pick the right AI tools for your business