Ship your Snake game
Your first public URL — the game leaves your laptop
Where: Claude Code · Folder: the
snake-v2folder from Exercise 1.2Start a new Claude Code session
before you begin.
Everything you've built so far lives on your laptop. An index.html sits in a folder, you open it, it works — and nobody else on earth can see it.
This exercise fixes that in one prompt. The distance between "it works on my machine" and "here's a link, try it" turns out to be about ninety seconds.
Step 1 — Point Claude at the game
Start a new Claude Code session in the snake-v2 folder from Exercise 1.2 — or snake from 1.1, or the on-brand one from 1.4. Whichever version you like best.
Prompt:
What files are in this folder
You should see your game file. If Claude says the folder is empty, you opened the wrong one — quit Claude Code and reopen it on the folder that actually has the game in it.
Step 2 — Ship it
Prompt:
Deploy this to Vercel and give me the live URL
(Use Vercel CLI, that is installed, I have a Vercel account)
It will probably open a browser tab to verify your 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. account. That's the account you created during setup — approve it and come back to the terminalTerminalThe text window where you type commands and your computer types back. macOS calls it Terminal; on Windows it's Command Prompt or PowerShell.. This is a one-time step; every deploy after this one skips it.
The first run also asks a few project questions — name, directory, framework. Let Claude answer them, or press enter through the defaults.
Step 3 — Send the link to someone
Open the URL on your phone first, to prove to yourself it's real. Then send it to a colleague, or your kids.
That's the exercise. A thing you made earlier today, playable by anyone with the link.
Stuck?Debrief — what should have happened
- Claude ran
vercelfrom the command line and printed a URL ending in.vercel.app. - The link opens on any device — no login, no install, no "which browser are you on?"
- You now know that put this in front of someone is a prompt, not a project.
We held this back until now on purpose. Deploying is the least interesting thing you've done today, and it's the part most people assume is the hard part. It isn't. Every artefact from here on ships the same way — the blog site in 3.4, the one-pager in 4.1, whatever you build the week after this course.
Stuck?FAQ for this exercise
Q: The browser tab opened and nothing happens. A: The Vercel login sometimes stalls on the first run. Close the tab, ask Claude to run vercel login again, and watch for the new tab. If your company uses SSO on 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., authorize the Vercel app for your org when prompted.
Q: vercel: command not found. A: The CLI didn't install globally. Tell Claude: "use npx vercel instead" — it works without the global install.
Q: It deployed, but the page is blank or shows a file listing. A: Your game file probably isn't called index.html. Say "rename the game file to index.html and redeploy" and it'll sort itself out.
Q: The URL is ugly. A: It is. Ask for a nicer one: "rename the Vercel project to <yourname>-snake and redeploy." Every deploy makes a new URL and the old ones stay live, so nothing breaks.
Q: My company blocks Vercel. A: Ask Claude to deploy to Cloudflare Pages instead — same shape of prompt, same result. Or ping us in Slack.
OptionalGo deeper
Change something, ship again. Ask for a new level or a high-score board, then:
Redeploy and give me the new URL
Notice how cheap the second deploy is. That's the actual unlock — not the first URL, but the fact that shipping stopped being an event.
Then go back and ship the rest. The Tetris from 1.1's Go deeper, the multiplication game from 1.2's — all of them are one prompt away from a link you can hand to somebody.