The phrase “If it’s not practical, it’s not spiritual” is a principal from Narcotics Anonymous that basically means that in order for something to have lofty meaning, it must have grounded purpose in practical, everyday life.

Zara Zhang’s Sublime Session was essentially a guide on making the practical spiritual thing. Messing around with new tools and making things that unexpectedly end up being super useful.

One year ago, Zara didn’t know what a terminal was. She was a Harvard psych major! Today, she is a prolific builder with dozens of projects that have gone viral (fun fact: she has 30k+ stars on GitHub).

“I didn’t pivot from storyteller to coder. I just discovered a new medium for storytelling,” she says.

In her Sublime Session (!! one of our most popular to date), Zara shared her approach to coding as a non-technical person, walked through five projects that went viral, and unpacked the lessons she’s learned.

Let this adaptation from the session act as a field guide to help you overcome the “I’m not techie” blocks and surprise yourself with what you can make.

Enjoy!

Sari

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Note: Sublime Sessions are free for Premium+ members. Upgrade to access the full archive of past sessions, including Emmett Shine on how to teach machines your taste, Lucas Crespo on how to create a unique visual identity, Carly Valancy on how to write an unignorable email, and more. This week only, you can use code MESSAROUND for 20% off.

A humanities major’s field guide to making software with a point of view

We’ll start with five things Zara built and the lesson from each. Then we’ll get into how she thinks and works, where her best ideas come from and her seven tips for “vibe coding.”

The big unlock for her was realizing that coding is now more of a skill than a profession. The same way that writing can be turned into a career, but is an important skill for anyone to learn. She believes coding is becoming something anyone with an idea can use.

Project No. 1: RIP PowerPoint

Instead of making presentation decks and emailing the file around, Zara built Frontend Slides (29k stars on Github), a skill that lets you present your ideas as interactive websites.

In plain English: you install Frontend Slides as a “skill” (basically a reusable set of instructions for Claude Code) and tell Claude you want to make a presentation. It then interviews you about your desired look and feel, generates a few visual directions, and builds the deck as a website you can keep editing with natural language.

The “deck” she used to present her session was built this exact way. You can have a look here: deck.zarazhang.com (plus you can see the prompt in slide 9).

She keeps the slides from looking generic thanks to a design.md file Claude generates based on her chosen aesthetics. Check out this presentation’s design.md file.

The coolest part is how Frontend Slides came to be. She didn’t sit down to architect a skill. She just asked Claude Code to help her make one good presentation as a website, and once she was happy with it, she asked Claude to package everything they had figured out into a reusable skill.

The lesson: You don’t start by making a skill. You start by making something you want, then asking Claude to turn the process into something reusable.

Project No. 2: Tab Out

Zara has hundreds of tabs open and no plan to close them (you’re not alone, Zara). To mitigate this chaos, she turned her “new-tab page” into a place to manage them in a delightful way. Every time she closes a tab, swoosh and confetti!

This is free for anyone to use and customize here. Someone’s already turned their copy into a to-do list.

The lesson: You don’t have to invent a whole new app. You can start with software you already use and modify the parts that annoy you!

Project No. 3: Hijack your own attention

If a company can hijack your attention to sell you something, Zara figured she could do the same thing to herself, for her own benefit.

She has a habit of saving posts on X and never actually reading them, so she built a simple tool that takes one of her bookmarked posts and pins it to the very top of her X feed. Now, the first thing she sees every time she opens the app is something she wants to see.

The lesson: Put the thing you want to do inside the habit you already have.

She did the same thing to her phone: while learning Japanese, she turned her lock screen into a slideshow of vocabulary flashcards, so every time she picked up her phone, she’d learn another word.

Project No. 4: Print the Podcast

Zara doesn’t think AI summaries work. In her words, they’re “too brief and too generic,” and they strip out everything that made the original good.

So instead of summarizing the podcast Acquired, she fed its full transcripts to Claude and had it turn each episode into a chapter of an actual book. She then had it printed and bound for herself.

You can see the prompt she used to make this work in slide 18 here. Claude skill here.

The lesson: If you love the content but not the container, remix it into the form you wish it came in.

Project No. 5: Turn Codebases into CS Courses

In school they teach you fundamentals first, then build. That’s backwards to Zara.

She’d rather build first and ask how it works after. (Mess around=find out.) After vibe coding LongCut, an app she built for learning from long YouTube videos, she asked Claude Code to turn the app’s own codebase into an interactive computer science course.

The lesson: Instead of studying computer science in the abstract, she learns it through something she already made and cares about. Don’t learn to build. Build to learn!

So you want to make stuff like this…

Zara says her ideas start in one of two ways: either there’s a problem she wants to fix; or she comes across new tech and sits down to try it. Once she builds something, she uses it for a week and watches her own behavior: does she use it? If not, she changes it or kills it.

Now that AI can build anything really quickly, what makes people want to use YOUR software?

For Zara, the answer is point of view. People will use your software if the opinion behind it resonates with them.

Frontend Slides came from her conviction that HTML is a better medium for presentations. Codebase-to-course comes from her belief that you should build to learn, not learn to build. And while there are endless AI tools for aggregating news, her Follow Builders skill resonated because people liked the philosophy behind it: follow builders, not influencers.

After a year of doing this constantly, she’s developed seven rules for vibe coding:

- Use the best model, not the cheapest. Counterintuitively, it will often end up being cheaper than if you use a dumber model.

- Treat it as your co-founder; not your employee (aka bring the problem, not the solution)

- Build around what you actually do, not what you think you’ll do. Don’t build for your fantasy behavior; design around the habits you already have.

- Remove more than you add. LLMs are good at adding things. Your most important job is to subtract, simplify, and cut.

- Put in the reps. Keep pushing the agent to its limits. Try crazy ideas and see what it does.

- Build in public. Sharing your work lets the internet teach you what you don’t know.

- Make it fun.

Zara ended on a line from Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw:

“It’s hard to compete with somebody who’s just there to have fun.”

We couldn’t help but think of Alex Dobrenko` and our upcoming Code for Creatives x Sublime Cohort.

If this field guide sparked any little impulse to build something, this cohort is the warmest environment to start. Maybe you want to rebuild your business website. Make yourself a beautiful personal site. Build an internal tool for the annoying thing you do every week. Turn some weird personal workflow into opinionated software.

Alex teaches anyone to essentially build anything, and he does it with a care and humor that is unmatched.

Cohort starts Sep 28th. Only a handful of spots left. Learn more and apply here.

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PS. Below the paywall the full recording of Zara’s session.