Start here — you want to build something and you don't code

./no-coder
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You land here if you have an idea you want to see built and you don’t write code. Maybe you never learned, maybe you stopped years ago, maybe it’s not your job and you don’t want it to be.

What you’ll find here isn’t vibe coding. Vibe coding gives you something that seems to work on day one and breaks on day thirty without you knowing why. This is different: you build with measurable acceptance criteria and at the end you have a .paella — a single file — containing the entire product brain: PRD, epics, stories, decisions, evidence, and code.

Why that matters

  • If you want someone else to review it, send the .paella. They open it and see what you promised vs what the tool delivered, with video for each criterion.
  • If you want to sell it, give it away, or hand it off, the code is clean and separated from the methodology. Any dev can continue it.
  • If you want to change it six months from now, you open the .paella and understand why each decision was made. You don’t rebuild your mental model from scratch.

First step: workspace mode

  1. Open PaellaDoc → workspace mode (not dev mode).
  2. Describe what you want to build in one sentence or one paragraph. PaellaDoc asks what’s missing, in normal language.
  3. When it’s clear enough, hit start. You see the progress on screen — not hidden magic. PRD being written, epic, stories, criteria, code.
  4. At the end you have the exported .paella and a running app on your machine.

Real example: GymRat

A non-developer built GymRat — a workout-logging app, SvelteKit + FastAPI, fully local. The .paella is 203 KB and downloadable.

If you’ve never seen a .paella from the inside, that’s your first exercise. Download it, open it, navigate: PRD → epic → story → criterion → evidence. In five minutes you understand the whole model.

Share here

  • What you want to build (one sentence). Doesn’t have to be a business idea — can be “an app for my mom to track her medications”.
  • What’s stopping you: the code, the cost, not knowing where to start, or something more specific.
  • When you build something, share the .paella in ./show-and-tell. The forum rule is that everything shared must include evidence — a .paella includes it by default.

— @jlcases