The Forge · vibe-coding cohort
Six weeks. No prior coding. You finish with a real website live on its own URL, a reference letter, and a half-decent answer to "so what do you do?" at the family dinner. The stack is the same one Kali uses to run her portfolio of 50+ Irish sites — Cursor, Claude, GitHub, Vercel. Free, like everything in The Forge.
The honest description: you describe what you want in normal English, an AI writes the code, you tell it what's wrong, it tries again. You're not memorising Python syntax. You're learning what to ask for, how to read the answer, and how to ship.
It is not magic and it is not pretending. You will get stuck. You will hit bugs. You will need to read a file and figure out what's going on. The difference is that there's a model sitting beside you and a mentor on a weekly call. The first time you push a real site to a real URL and send the link to your mam, you'll know what we mean.
This is exactly how Kali ships the 50+ .ie sites you'll find linked across Built In Ireland. She doesn't have a CS degree either. The pattern works.
No more "build a todo app". The site you ship is for somewhere or something you actually care about — and someone will use it after. Pick one of these or pitch your own at the start of the cohort.
What's on this weekend, mass times, bin days, who's collecting for the Tidy Towns. A page anyone in your home town will actually open. Hand it off to a local volunteer at the end and it keeps living.
Senior, junior, ladies, juvenile. Pull the upcoming fixtures from the county board feed, list results, link to the club's social. Beats the broken Wix site half of clubs are still on.
The pub, the café, the chemist, the post office, the takeaway, the chipper. Photos, opening hours, phone numbers, a map. Useful to anyone who's ever been a tourist in their own country.
Where to bring batteries, how to compost, who fixes things for free locally, when the next bring-and-fix is on. Useful to your neighbours, easy to update, instantly indexed on Google.
A clean, fast index of the independents in your town or county. Cards, photos, links, a contact form per listing. Some cohort members keep these running afterward and add a small "featured" fee.
Got an idea you've been parking for two years? Bring it on day one. We'll scope it together to fit a six-week timeline. If it doesn't fit, we trim it. If it really doesn't fit, we pick something else and you ship yours later.
One 60-minute group call a week. One 15-minute one-to-one mentor check-in. The rest is you, your laptop, and the model.
Install Cursor. Make a GitHub account. Make a Vercel account. Deploy a blank page to a live URL the same evening. You'll know the round-trip from "I changed something" to "it's live" before the kettle's boiled.
What's the site for, who'll use it, what one screen do they need. Build it together with the model. Push it. Look at it on your phone. Realise it looks rubbish on mobile. Fix it.
A list of things, pulled from a CSV or a Google Sheet. A handful of pages generated from data. Now it stops being a brochure and starts being a useful site.
A contact form. A signup. A submit-an-event flow. Whatever your site needs to be more than read-only. Hooked up to Formspree or Tally so you're not running a backend.
Show it to three people who'd actually use it. Watch them try. Write down what confused them. Fix the worst three things. Set up Google Search Console + a Plausible counter so you can see who shows up.
One more pass. Custom domain if you want one. Write your two-paragraph reflection. Mentor signs off. Reference letter signed and the public verifiable URL published at builtinireland.ie/references/<your-slug>. Optional: a 15-minute "show and tell" on the next group call.
Concretely, not aspirationally. The before/after for someone with no coding background.
End-to-end, on your own, without a developer in the room. Buy a domain, point it at Vercel, see the site live in under 10 minutes.
You'll know how to phrase a request, how to paste error messages back, when to push back on the model, and when to start a fresh thread.
Open the file. Change the thing. Commit. Push. See it live. The loop is what feels alien at the start and second-nature by week 4.
You won't be writing React from memory. You will be able to look at a file, understand roughly what it does, and ask the model the right question.
Commit, branch, push, pull, basic merge. Enough to work on a small team or contribute to The Forge's own cooperative projects.
Same Forge mechanic as everyone else. Signed PDF + public verifiable URL at builtinireland.ie/references/<your-slug>. That's the bit recruiters actually care about.
If you're already a working developer, you'll be bored. Skip this and apply to the localnews.ie or pubhub.ie cohorts where you'll do real engineering work. Or apply as a mentor.
If you want to be told exactly what to type and never have to think — this isn't the shape of it. Vibe coding works because you're an active participant. The model isn't the worker; you are. The model is the tool.
If you can't commit to six weeks of two hours plus a couple of mentor calls, defer to the next cohort. We'd rather you ship something than start something.
The cohort is free. Like the rest of The Forge, you're paid in experience, a portfolio piece and a reference. There are a couple of tool costs you'll want to know about.
GitHub (free tier covers everything you'll do), Vercel (free hobby tier deploys your site, no credit card needed), Claude (free tier is plenty to start).
Cursor Pro (~€20/month) — the free tier works for week 1 but you'll likely upgrade once you see what it can do. Claude Pro (~€18/month) — same story. Both are cancellable monthly.
An .ie domain costs around €18/year through Blacknight or webworld. Optional — Vercel gives you a free your-site.vercel.app URL that works fine for the reference.