I’ve spent the better part of this year writing about how AI, specifically vibe coding, can turn anyone into a programmer—theoretically. Now the time has come to test this theory.
Claude Code is the tool I was most curious about, having interviewed its founder and tracked its rise in popularity from its June debut. Anthropic now calls it “the best coding model in the world,” though that kind of claim is hard to back up. Plus, AI companies tend to use hyperbolic language like “the smartest” and “the best” model ever.
To see what the hype was about for myself, I called up my contacts at Anthropic and told them I wanted to use Claude Code to complete a small project, all on my own. They were excited, but we agreed it might be a stretch. To start, there’s no public-facing guide for non-programmers on how to set up and use Claude Code. So, Anthropic created one especially for me, with FAQs like “What is a Terminal?”—something 100% of programmers already know, but I needed.
Three days and a few hours later, I had coded a custom website with minimal issues. It was an eye-opening experience and a ton of fun. The website addresses a problem I encountered while house hunting in the New York City metro area—determining the walking distance to public transit stops. I had to constantly copy and paste addresses from Zillow or Redfin into Google Maps, configure the directions, view the walk time, and repeat. Mundane, to say the least.
My Claude-Coded website pulls listings from Redfin and automatically calculates the walk time to the nearest train stop. The data is displayed in a simple interface with a map and key details about each home. Here’s how I did it, and how to get started with your own project.
Virtually all AI chatbots can generate snippets of code, but a proper vibe coding tool takes programming to the next level. Many have direct access to files on your computer and can see the entire codebase . That’s why professional engineers are still the primary audience.
In addition to Claude Code, some of the biggest names in this space include OpenAI’s Codex, GitHub Copilot, Replit, Lovable, and Windsurf, whose VP of product and marketing we interviewed for our vibe coding explainer. All of these will require a little bit of technical know-how to set up. Here’s how I did it with Claude Code.
Not a Web Page: Installing Claude Code on Your Computer
First things first, Claude Code requires a subscription, either the $17/month Pro or $100/month Max plan. You cannot access it through the web-based Claude chatbot, which is free. Anthropic set me up with the $100/month Max plan to get started, but that was probably overkill. My humble real estate website would’ve likely worked with the $17 Pro plan.
Claude pricing plans (Credit: Anthroic)
Once you sign up online, the next steps depend on whether you’re on Windows or macOS, though the principles are the same for both. I’m on a Mac, so I’ll focus on that. (Anthropic also offers bare-bones instructions for other operating systems.)
The Terminal app icon (Credit: Apple)
First, open the Terminal app. “The terminal is a built-in app on your Mac that lets you interact with your computer by typing commands,” says Anthropic’s guide. “Think of it as a different way to ‘talk’ to your computer to control it more directly. It’s also the primary interface for accessing Claude Code.”
Copy and paste this command into your terminal: curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash. Press Enter. You’ll see some text, followed by a message indicating that the installation was successful. But don’t make the same mistake I did and think it was ready to go. Before the “success” message, you may see a small note in yellow font with additional commands to run. Do whatever is there, and then close and re-open the terminal.
Installation may say ‘successful,’ but make sure you check for any additional setup notes. (Credit: Claude Code)
In a new terminal window, type claude and press Enter. It will then ask you if you want to log in with your Claude account or through an API for professionals. Select your choice with keyboard arrows, not your mouse, and then press Enter. I selected number one below, linked to my account, and within seconds, I was ready to rock.
On the login screen, you can select a subscription plan or API connection, for professionals. (Credit: Claude Code)
Picking a Project: What Are the Options?
Now I had the world of AI coding at my fingertips, but the big question was what did I want to make? A Windsurf exec I interviewed once mentioned that beginners could easily create a custom version of the game Wordle. I also considered creating an event invitation generator, such as for holiday or birthday parties, but Claude does not have image generation. (That’s a notable difference between its competitors, given the increasing commodification of chatbots.)
But neither option seemed truly useful, so I reflected on problems I encountered in the last year that could be solved with technology. House hunting was a particular slog, made more complicated by my need to know how far each listing was from the nearest train station. It was a clear gap in Zillow, so I thought maybe I could solve it on my own.
Here’s the prompt I entered that kicked off my project, using a nearby town (not where I was looking), but that runs along the same type of train line.
> Create a website where I can see real estate listings in my area with certain criteria. I want single family homes in Montclair, NJ within a 15 minute walk of a NJ transit train station [a commuter train to NYC]. The homes should have 4 bedrooms, with at least 1.5 bathrooms.
Kicking off my project (Credit: Claude Code)
‘Code’ (or Chat) Your Heart Out
From here, it was all simple, natural-language-based chatting. However, I brought some basic technical know-how to the chat that helped move the conversation along. For example, I know that websites need data to populate them, and that data needs to be publicly available for me to use it. One of the first things I asked Claude was if Zillow had an API that made listing data public, and also if Google Maps had one, so it could calculate each listing’s distance to the station stops.
Claude Code thought for a few seconds and then told me Zillow did have a public API, and it was not only free but also sufficient for what I wanted to do. Win! But Google’s would cost money, so it recommended an alternative, and I blindly went with it.
(Claude Code will always ask your permission and check in with suggestions, which is great, but a novice like me might often be tempted to say “yes” no matter what, and hope for the best. Do so at your own risk!)
The AI sends me the plan for the website before getting started. (Credit: Claude Code)
The tool also looked up a wealth of information on its own. For example, it found all the New Jersey Transit train stops in the town of Montclair without me having to include them in the prompt. It proactively listed them so I could confirm. It designed the website with no aesthetic input from me required, found the links to the APIs, and sent me instructions on how to sign up. Within 10 minutes of me sending my first prompt, it had created the basic website framework for me to run on my computer.
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I viewed it by typing this into my browser search bar: http://localhost:8000. It looked great, or at least entirely sufficient. But keep in mind, these types of sites run locally on your machine. You cannot share them with your friends through a live web link. That would require registering and paying for a domain name, which Claude could also likely guide you through.
The last step was to connect to those APIs and populate the data on the left and right sides of the page, shown below. That’s where my trouble started.
First iteration of the website (Credit: Claude Code)
Troubleshooting, Refining, and One Big Snag
I opened the websites Claude sent me to connect to the APIs, and followed its simple instructions: Create a free account, search for the APIs in the site’s menu, and paste a unique identifier back into Claude. I did this twice, once for Zillow, and once for the maps. It was a little confusing, but ultimately I found the identifiers and Claude accepted them.
I saw my terminal fill up with code and text from Claude as it showed the work it was doing. Finally, it said, “Ok, you’re connected,” and asked me to refresh the website to see the data. It didn’t work as expected. Only the map appeared, but no housing listings. The map also showed incorrect locations for the transit stops. As you can see below, the red icons (transit stops) are not on the main train track that runs through the middle of the image. I pointed this out to Claude, however, and it immediately recalibrated and fixed it.
Website populates with the map, but the Zillow API fails to load. (Credit: Claude Code)
So that left the main issue: No listings. The website showed a 404 error for the Zillow API. I pasted the error message into Claude and asked, “Here’s the error code. What’s going on?” It said it figured out the issue and asked me to refresh, but I still saw no listings. This happened four times, including in another browser, which it asked me to try. I double-checked that the identifiers I pasted in were correct, and Claude ran some tests on the connection to Zillow.
Nothing worked. We were stuck in a loop of proposing options, which I’d approve, and they failed to flow through to the website. I finally got fed up and asked it to stop and think of a new plan. It suggested three solutions, one of which was to try using Redfin data. I selected that option, and it began working on it. Happily, after another refresh, the listings appeared!
(I later asked a programmer friend why the Zillow connection didn’t work. They looked into it and could easily see that the public, free Zillow API had been discontinued—a big detail Claude had missed.)
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Fed up with Zillow, I confront Claude Code and we regroup on a new plan to use Redfin data. (Credit: Claude Code)
The map now showed four green icons, one for each listing, with a drawing of a house inside. But I couldn’t see the listings themselves, which should have appeared on the right side of the image below.
“Why is the UI glitching and not fully showing the listings?” I asked Claude. It would flash and show them only for a split second. Claude then made a few changes to the frontend, and after some back-and-forth, we got it up and running.
The listings populate on the map, but don’t surface on the right side of the website. (Credit: Claude Code)
(Not that any of them would’ve been in my budget! That $6,500,000 listing is a multi-family property, it turns out, but the listing agent uploaded it to Redfin and Zillow as a single-family home, so it appeared in the data.)
The listings finally show and the website is up and running. (Credit: Claude Code)
Final Checks: Is The Right Information in There?
Now that I could see the listings, I was ready to check the data quality. Everything was correct when I cross-referenced Redfin—the price, location, days on market, bedrooms, and bathrooms—but the main datapoint I wanted, the walk time, was consistently three to five minutes shorter on my Claude-Coded website than Google Maps.
I pointed the discrepancy out to Claude, and it claimed the mapping API we used was calculating the time as a crow flies, not someone walking on the street. To fix it, it offered to increase the “circuity factor” in the equation it was using to calculate walk time.
After a few rounds of it increasing the circuity factor, and me validating the results on Google Maps, the walk time was nearly the same on my site. But that meant only two listings now met my criteria of being less than a 15-minute walk to station, down from five.
As a final step, I asked it to add a walk time filter to the site that I could adjust myself in case I wanted to see homes slightly further out. It came up with a sliding scale filter that I could drag to increase or decrease walk time. Presumably, it could do the same for price, bedrooms, bathrooms, and any other datapoint you asked it to pull from Redfin—your own personal house hunting website, customized to your needs.
Claude adds a walk time filter. (Credit: Claude Code)
Claude Code Even Helped Organize My Files to Write This Story
So, I did it! This happened over the course of three days, but only an hour or two on each day. And I didn’t code anything; I just talked to a chatbot.
Lastly, Claude even helped me organize my materials to write this article. Since the terminal can access my local machine directly, it’s more integrated into my computer than a web-based chatbot. It can search, organize, and modify files on my device. I asked it to look through all the screenshots I had taken, which were automatically saved to my desktop, and to organize them.
“Can you find all the screenshots of Claude Code and put them in a folder named “Claude Code” on my desktop?” I asked it. “Also, rename them ‘Terminal’ with a unique number, starting with 1, and assign the number based on the timestamp, starting with the earliest one.”
A folder Claude Code created on my desktop, with its numbered Terminal screenshots, plus a few screenshots I pulled in myself that it missed. (Credit: Emily Forlini)
It worked for the most part, although I manually went through and found a few that it had missed. I then asked it to do the same with the screenshots of the Montclair Homes website we created, naming them Website 1, 2, 3, etc. based on timestamp. I asked it to put them in a sub-folder within the new Claude Code folder. That also worked, though I again had to clean them up. It was a helpful starting point, in the end, though not perfect.
Finally, since I had very little idea what Claude Code actually did, technically speaking, I asked it for a summary to make sure I represented it accurately. I’ll let you read that for yourself below.
In the end, it was a miraculous experience. I can see why software engineers often use AI-coding assistants daily, once they start, according to a recent Gallup survey—far more than the general public leans on all-purpose chatbots. They’re hooked, and I can see why.
Claude summarizes how it built my house hunting website (Credit: Claude Code)
About Our Expert
Emily Forlini
Senior Reporter
Experience
As a news and features writer at PCMag, I cover the biggest tech trends that shape the way we live and work. I specialize in on-the-ground reporting, uncovering stories from the people who are at the center of change—whether that’s the CEO of a high-valued startup or an everyday person taking on Big Tech. I also cover daily tech news and breaking stories, contextualizing them so you get the full picture.
I came to journalism from a previous career working in Big Tech on the West Coast. That experience gave me an up-close view of how software works and how business strategies shift over time. Now that I have my master’s in journalism from Northwestern University, I couple my insider knowledge and reporting chops to help answer the big question: Where is this all going?
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