Now you can.

Everyone Can Program Now

Have an idea for a thing? A site for your club, a tool for your job, a game for your friends, a page that makes sense of some data you care about. You can build it this semester.

For seventy years, that wasn't true. Building anything with a computer meant learning a programming language first, and most people never got past that gate. Now you can. Anyone who can describe what they want clearly, and tell whether they got it, can build working things by talking with AI. People who can't code are creating technology.

This course starts there. You will design and build real things, websites, interactive tools, games, visualizations, and you'll never have to understand a line of code.

What You'll Learn

Building things through conversation is not magic. It is a skill, and it can be taught. It comes down to three things:

• Specifying what you want, precisely enough that it can be built.
• Evaluating whether what you got is actually what you wanted.
• Iterating when it isn't.

That's how software gets made. The code is an artifact, not the point. Over the semester you will practice the full cycle: explore a problem, design a solution, prototype it quickly with AI, critique what you built, iterate through dialogue, and validate it with real users. These are human questions, not technical ones. You've been answering questions like them your whole life.

Does It Work?

People will tell you that you can't judge an app without understanding the code. But you already judge apps every day. You know when one is slow, confusing, or broken. You know when a website does what you came for. Product managers, designers, testers, and every person who has ever chosen one app over another evaluate them without reading a line of code. The question "does it work?" has never required reading code.

What this course adds is discipline: knowing what you actually know, what you are trusting the machine on, and what only you can own. You will learn where AI is reliable enough to trust and verify, where it will confidently tell you something is finished when it isn't, and where it structurally cannot help, because only you know what your project is for and who it is for.

How the Course Works

This is a studio, not a lecture. Most of our time is spent building: you at your laptop, working on your own project, with help close at hand. The rest is spent looking at each other's work, sometimes in pairs, sometimes all together, and sometimes watching over someone's shoulder while they build, because how you work with AI is as much the subject here as what you make. We borrow from how architects and designers have taught for centuries: work is made, shown, critiqued, and revised. Critique is a skill, and we practice it kindly and precisely.

You'll start many projects. Some you'll complete, some you won't. You'll learn something from each of them. And you'll build things that you and others can use and care about.

Your grade is participation: show up, build, show your work, and take part in critique. You will work on your own laptop with an AI coding agent: like the chatbots you may already use, but one that can also build the thing you describe. We set it up together in the first week.

Who This Is For

Anyone. This course is designed for students with no technical background, and it assumes nothing: no programming, no computer science, no particular major. If you have ideas and you're curious whether you could make them real, you belong here. If you have programmed before, you're welcome too, but be ready to work differently.

If you're an educator watching this experiment: we don't know how this ends. That's why we're running it. Follow along if you want to find out together.

To Parts Unknown

Nobody has taught this course before, including me. The syllabus is a plan, and plans meet students. Some of what we try will work and some of it won't, and you'll be the first to find out which. Part of this course is planned and part is still being sketched. We'll draw it together.