The Maker's Guide to AI Coding

AI coding assistants are changing what makers and solopreneurs can build. Tasks that once demanded weeks of learning a new language, framework, or software stack can now be delegated to an AI-provided you know how to describe the job, judge the result, and keep control of the process.

The Maker's Guide to AI Coding is a practical guide to doing exactly that. It explains how to work with AI coding tools as collaborators rather than vending machines, how much to delegate, how to write specifications that produce useful results, and how to recognise hallucinations, context drift, overconfidence, and code that runs but is still wrong.

The book is built around four increasingly ambitious projects. You begin with a browser-based RC filter analyser, then develop a live serial data plotter for Arduino and other microcontrollers. Next comes a datasheet questionand- answer tool using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), followed by a complete multi-user resource booking system with authentication, a database, external services, background jobs, and deployment.

No advanced programming background is required. The emphasis is on thinking clearly, guiding the AI, testing what it produces, and preserving the skills needed to evaluate its work. Along the way, you learn development workflow designed to remain useful as tools evolve.

If you can describe what you want to build, this book shows you how to turn that description into working software.