Show Notes
Episode 4 of our beginner series on directing AI to build software, aimed at non-coders who worry about the technical side.
The instinct when building something big with AI is to plan the whole cathedral at once, but a coding agent will happily produce a convincing shell with nothing plumbed in behind it. This episode makes the case for shipping one thin, complete path through your system first — a slice a real person could actually use — so you can verify what you've built with your own eyes. For complete beginners, it's a way to protect your time, energy and motivation before week six kills the project.
In this episode: - Build a vertical slice first: the thinnest complete path through the whole system - Why the cathedral trap is the beginner's biggest mistake, and how AI makes it worse - How a slice preserves the verify habit that a cathedral destroys - Grouping slices into milestones phrased as simply true or false - Beating scope creep with one sentence: 'not in this slice' - Using Plan Mode in Claude Code and Codex to turn slices into a rhythm - Why sliced projects survive interruptions while cathedrals starve motivation
Sources: episode-04-think-in-slices (1).md
Full episode page: https://fatsandsugars.com/ai-hype-signal/how-to-build-software-with-ai-ep-4-think-in-slices/
AI Hype & Signal is produced with AI, including its two synthetic hosts, and every episode is grounded in cited sources and reviewed before release. Even so, it is intended for general information and discussion, not professional advice, so please check anything important against the original sources linked above before relying on it.
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