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How You'll Build Today

You've set up your workspace and met your AI assistant. Before you jump into the lessons and start building, let's cover how the pieces fit together.

A Software Project Is Just Files and Folders

When you hear "codebase" or "software project," it sounds technical. It's not. A project is just files organized in folders, the same way you organize documents in Google Drive or SharePoint. Folders have names, files sit inside them, and each file has a purpose: some are pages, some are styles, some are data.

The difference is that some of those files contain code. You do not need to open, read, or edit them yourself. When you tell your AI assistant to build something, it creates and edits real files in your project on your behalf. You direct the work; the AI does the typing.

The Build Loop

Here is the rhythm you will follow for the rest of the day:

  1. You describe what you want in plain English.
  2. Your AI assistant edits files in the project to make it happen.
  3. You check the result in Live Preview.

If something is wrong, you tell your AI assistant what to fix, in plain English, and it makes the change. That's the whole loop. You will repeat it dozens of times today.

Save & Sync

Your project lives in the cloud, not on your laptop. Problems are rare, but a workspace can occasionally get into a bad state, and unsaved work could be lost. Save & Sync is how you protect against that, and it does two things:

  • Save records your changes locally. Think of it like hitting Ctrl+S on a Word document.
  • Sync pushes your work to GitLab, a safe place outside your workspace. Think of it like moving a file from your computer into Google Drive. Even if something happens to your workspace, the file is still there in the cloud.

Syncing also makes your changes visible to your teammates. When you sync, they can see what you just built. When they sync, you see theirs. It is both your backup and your collaboration tool.

You want to do both every time. Just tell your AI assistant:

Save my progress and sync it.

When to do it: every time something works. A new feature, a fix, a change you are happy with. When you save after something works, you create a known-good point you can always return to. That means you can try something ambitious next, knowing that if it breaks, you have not lost what was already working.

Working as a Team

Each person on your team has their own workspace, but all of your workspaces connect to the same project. Think of it like a shared Google Doc: multiple people can work on it at the same time, but if two people try to write the exact same sentence in the exact same section, you end up writing over each other and creating nonsense. The same thing is true in a codebase. A codebase is just files, and when two people edit the same file at the same time, their changes can collide.

The trick is swim lanes: divide the work so each person is working on a distinctly different part of the application. If one person is building the login page and another is building the dashboard, those are separate files and separate components. That is safe to do in parallel, the same way two people can work on different sections of a Google Doc without stepping on each other.

Because you are not writing the code yourself, it may not always be obvious when your work might collide with a teammate's. A good rule of thumb: if you are working on visually different parts of the application (different screens, different features), you are probably safe. If you are working on the same part of the UI or the same capability, there is a good chance your changes will overlap. When in doubt, start by mobbing (everyone working together on one screen) until you have clear swim lanes to divide and conquer. You can always ask your AI assistant what parts of the project can be worked on in parallel to help you find those safe lanes.

Save & Sync is how you stay in sync with each other.

Meet Your Team

Team Discussion | ~3 minutes total | Round robin, one person at a time

Go around your team and have each person share two things:

  1. Your AI experience so far. Have you used ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another AI tool before? Daily? Once or twice? Never? No wrong answers.
  2. What you are hoping to learn. What do you want to walk away from this lab being able to do?

Listen to each other. You will be building together for the rest of the day, and knowing where everyone is starting from makes the whole team stronger.

Key Insight

Your project is just files and folders. You describe what you want, AI edits those files, and you check the result. Save & Sync protects your work and shares it with your team. When you split up, work in swim lanes: different features, different parts of the application. That is everything you need to start building.