Snake, raw
Create a game — feel the WOW
This is your first agent run. Keep the prompt stupidly simple. Watch what a good agent does with almost nothing.
Before we start — two things you'll do every exercise
1. Start a new Claude Code session
.
Open Claude Code and start a fresh sessionSessionA single ongoing conversation with Claude Code. Every message, every file Claude has read, every tool result lives inside one session — stored locally on your machine.. Every time we say Start a new Claude Code session, this is the button you press.
2. Create a new folder
, then point Claude Code at it.
First make an empty folder on your laptop: in Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (Windows), go somewhere easy like your Desktop and choose New Folder — call it snake. Then, in Claude Code's folder picker, select that new empty folder. "Create a new folder" and "select a folder" are the same move here: you're pointing Claude at the empty folder you just made.
The folder you pick is everything Claude can see — it reads, writes, and runs commands inside this folder, and nothing outside it. Fresh exercise → fresh folder.
Don't see a folder picker? It's in the prompt window — look just above where you type. If Claude Code dropped you straight into your home folder (you'll see Documents, Downloads, etc. when you list files), quit and re-open it; pick the empty folder you just made when it asks.
Verify you're in the right place.
Prompt:
What files are in this folder
You should see Claude answer that the folder is empty — that's correct. If it lists your other GitHubGitHubThe website where most people host git repositories. Git is the tool, GitHub is one popular place that stores the result. Owned by Microsoft, free for public projects. folders or random documents instead, you opened the wrong folder; quit Claude Code and reopen it with the empty folder you just created.
Step 1 — The simple prompt
Type this. Nothing else.
Prompt:
Create a snake game using simple HTML
Deploy this to Vercel and give me the live URL
(Use Vercel CLI, that is installed, I have a Vercel account)
Hit enter. Watch it build.
It might ask you to verify VercelVercelA hosting service. You give it a folder of code; it gives you back a public URL anyone in the world can open — turns your Snake game into a link you can text someone in seconds. on the browser.
Stuck?Debrief — what should have happened
- Claude wrote a one-file
index.htmlwith a working Snake game. - It ran
vercelfrom the command line, possibly opened a browser to authenticate, and printed a public URL. - The game works. It is also, almost certainly, generic — green snake, red apple, no menu, no theme, no surprise.
That's the point. You gave the agent almost nothing. It filled in the blanks from memory. Note how generic the result is — that gap is what Exercise 1.2 closes.
Common things that go wrong. The Vercel auth flow can stall on the first run; check the browser tab it opened. If the build is taking longer than three minutes for a snake game, the agent may be over-engineering — Start a new Claude Code session and tell it to be quick. If you're stuck at "816 tokens and nothing is happening," same fix.
Stuck?FAQ for this exercise
Q: My snake game has been working for 3 minutes 20 seconds and it's still not deployed. Why? It's stuck at 816 tokens. A: Could be Claude being unreliable on their side because so many people are using it. It can also be that adding things like onboarding flows requires a multi-layered frontend, so instead of a 50-line file you're getting back ~1,000 lines, which just takes longer. Try checking your usage in Settings → Usage, or Start a new Claude Code session and tell it to be quick.
Q: It would be nice if you later show the HTMLHTMLThe markup language for web pages — defines the structure: headings, paragraphs, buttons, images. CSS styles it; JavaScript makes it interactive. that was created and where it is locally — most people haven't seen the code itself that they created. A: The beauty is you don't have to see the code. If you go back to the folder where you created the game and ask questions there, Claude will see the game in that folder. You never have to know where the code lives — just make sure you use the same folder to continue working on that project.
Q: How do I open the file once it's created? It just says it's created. A: Just ask Claude — "give me the link to the file" or "open it with Finder," and it will hand it to you or open it directly.
OptionalGo deeper
Same prompt shape, different generic game. Start a new Claude Code session, fresh empty folder:
Create a simple Tetris using HTML
Deploy this to Vercel and give me the live URL
Notice the result is just as generic as Snake — green blocks, default font, no theme. Empty specs collapse to the average no matter the topic. The fix isn't a different game; it's a richer brief.