How Non-Coders Build Apps with Cloud Code (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Today, I'll show you how to use Cloud Code as a non-coder. We'll start by clearing up the biggest misconception you probably have about Cloud Code, and then obviously we're gonna build an app, but we'll do it at the right level of complexity for you. Along the way, I'll cover three reasons why you'd even want to use Cloud Code and one big red flag why you shouldn't. I'm David DeWinter. I partnered with Anthropic to bring you this one. So the biggest misconception is that Cloud Code is only for developers. It's not. It's a general AI agent that happens to write code. You choose a folder to work in and describe what you want in plain English. So if you know Cloud Cowork, you're most of the way there. Tutorial for that in the top right, by the way. Code runs on the same engine as Cowork. It's just that Cowork has more guardrails so you don't end up shooting yourself in the foot. That means that Cowork can build apps too. So let's actually see what's different about Code. Here I'm running it inside of Visual Studio Code and there's a desktop app as well. You don't have to use a scary looking terminal window or a command prompt. So with that, let's walk through the steps of building an app. The first trick is picking the right thing to build. Keep it small, keep it focused, and it sounds silly, but make sure whatever you build will actually be useful to someone. If you can't say out loud why it's worth building, don't build it. And if you need some inspiration, check out some of the many apps that you use at work that are crammed into Excel or Google Sheets. Some of those are ripe for turning into real software. Here's an example. I keep my sales pipeline in a spreadsheet. It works, but every time a deal changes its stage, I have to go do a handful of other things like reorganize folders on our shared drive, gather new docs, research the account, and so on. So I'm gonna build an app that handles all of that for me. To follow along, you can grab Cloud Code right here. I recommend also downloading Visual Studio Code so you can see your files while you work. When you start with VS Code, you'll want to do two things. First, use the Open Folder link to open an empty folder on your computer. I've got one here already called Sales Pipeline. Second, to get Cloud Code to show up, click on the Extensions button in the sidebar, then type in Cloud to find the Cloud Code extension. You're looking for the official one made by Anthropic. You should see a blue Install button here to install it. Once the install completes, click here to open the secondary sidebar and make sure Cloud Code is selected. You'll see this window down below. You can go a little bananas with the customization, so let's close the one in the middle and then head back to the Explorer view. The Explorer view shows everything in this folder. I've got my pipeline spreadsheet here already. There's a link in the description if you want to grab it too. Let's start by telling Cloud what we want. Click in the prompt box and type this in. I'm not a developer. I track my pipeline inside at sign salespipeline.xl. And yes, that's a trick. Use the at sign to refer to any file in this folder. Continuing on, I want a simple app that shows my deals grouped by stage that can read from this file, where I can drag a deal from one stage to the next. When I change stages, it updates the Excel. Interview me about anything else you need to know. Now, before you run this, switch over to plan mode. Do that by clicking on this hand icon in the bottom right. This makes Cloud show me its plan before it touches anything, so I can catch a wrong turn before it spends time building the wrong thing. So when I build a new feature or a new app, I turn this on from the very start. Now, while this is working, here's a quick overview of all the modes. We've got the manual mode, where it's going to ask for approval before making any changes. Edit automatically will handle changes in files automatically, but will still ask your permission to run any custom tools. Plan mode, we've already covered. And then auto mode will try to auto approve actions as long as Cloud doesn't think that they're risky. Now, after about 30 seconds, it's going to ask us some questions. Remember, in our prompt, we asked it to interview us about what it needed to know. That's a prompting trick you can use when you're not sure which context is relevant. Answer the questions based on what you want to see. I want these three fields on every card. I want the last updated column to be updated when I move deals between stages. For now, I just want dragging to work, and I do want it to back up the Excel before I make changes. Hit submit answers when you're done. A couple seconds later, you'll get a plan to review. Like I said, the plan is a great way to make sure Cloud doesn't steer off track. Remember when we said I'm not a developer? This is a great way to teach Cloud to keep it non-technical for us. But if you have any questions or you want to make changes, I like to use this tell Cloud what to do instead box. For example, if you don't know what OpenPy Excel is, you could type in something like this. You quote what it says and you ask, what does it mean? It comes back pretty quickly, even apologizing for the jargon that it's writing. It tells you what OpenPy Excel is and even offers to remove the rest of the jargon from the plan. If you want to rewrite the plan, go ahead and do so. I'm gonna keep things moving and type approved. I'll press enter. I'll click yes and auto accept edits because I don't want it to bug me until it's done. In fact, I'm gonna make that even stronger by clicking the modes button again and then clicking auto. That takes a few minutes to complete, but let me show you the first reason why you'd reach for Cloud Code over Cowork. While it builds, you can see every file that it creates right here. Cowork doesn't offer that level of visibility inside the app. Now that it's finished, it's also made this file that we can double click to open it. To quickly get there, right click on the file and then select reveal in file explorer. That opens the folder where we can double click on this .bat file to open the app. Now remember, this app is linked to the spreadsheet, which means if I drag a deal to a new stage, it should be updated there. We can verify this by opening the document and seeing that Northwind Traders is in the active stage. The last updated date was also marked as today. Now Cloud Code could build this too, but here's where we get clunky. I'm gonna ask Cloud Code to reach out to a different folder on my computer. Here's the new feature we're going to build. See all those accounts in the spreadsheet also have their own folder inside of our shared drive. When an account moves from prospects to active, we also want their folder to move into the active folder. We also wanna make sure that all of these sub folders are present in the account. To do this, I'm gonna paste a prompt from the resource guide. That's also in the description. Let's go through it step by step. We're keeping it pretty simple. When a deal moves to active, it should change its location on the shared drive. Here's the shared drive location. Active accounts should be in the active folder and should have sub folders created if they don't already exist. Remember, we switch this to plan mode first before we make the change. We can do that with this menu, but the faster way is to hold shift and press tab until you get the right mode. While this is running, by the way, this is reason number two to use code. It can reach across your machine to entirely different folders. In CodeWork, I'd have to stop and add that folder to its permission list first. That sandbox in CodeWork can be useful or it can really slow you down. This is a case of the latter. This plan I approved off camera. Let's see what Claude did. We've got the active folders on the right side of the screen. Let's see what happens when we move the Contoso account from prospect to active. We see the Contoso folder is added and all of the new sub folders are there. Now this worked on my machine, but sometimes you might not like the changes that Claude makes. Reason number three to use Claude code is just a better environment, something we call a harness. There are all sorts of commands you can access using the slash key that don't exist in CodeWork. One example is slash rewind. Use this to roll back both your code and your conversation to a point in the past. CodeWork also doesn't have an explicit plan mode. Other cool commands include slash goal, where you can keep a prompt going until it accomplishes exactly what you want. And for fun, drop a comment if you know what slash stickers does. Now let's talk about how you share an app. Today it lives on your machine and you can open it with a double click. If a teammate wants it, you can copy all of the files that you just created over to their machine. But if the whole team needs it, that's likely a conversation with your IT team. The problem you want to avoid is that when there's an issue, you'll have to fix it on everybody's machine. There are better ways to build software. Now, you remember that misconception I told you earlier? I said, CodeWork could do a lot of the same things. So I actually built this app with the same prompts in Cloud CodeWork. The difference is all in the details. So instead of plan mode, I had to ask it to write a plan. I had to explicitly grant it permission to reach that folder in our shared drive. There's no file view to watch it work and there's no slash rewind if something breaks. Code just makes those moments smoother. Now, if you're still on the fence about using Cloud Code, here's a big red flag not to use it. Cloud Code runs with close to full access to your machine and certainly far fewer of the guardrails than what CodeWork gives you. So for example, if this permanent deletion question in CodeWork makes you nervous and you don't know how to tell if it's safe or not, then Cloud Code isn't for you. Now you know when to reach for Cloud Code and if CodeWork is actually enough for you. Remember, you can download Cloud Code using the link in the description below. Let me know in the comments what else you'd like to learn about Cloud. I'm David, I'll see you in the next one.