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Start with GitHub, whatever else you do

Article zero in the series "I wish I'd known this from the start". This is the foundation everything else rests on. For the record, this project has used Claude as its main AI from the beginning.

I am not a developer

Let me admit this up front: I have almost no experience as a developer. I can follow code well enough to guess what it's doing, and I've worked alongside engineering teams, but building something myself from scratch is more or less new to me with this game.

I made this game. Most of the code was written by AI

The reason someone like me can build a browser game is that the AI writes the code. What I do is plan, decide on specs, test on real devices, and judge whether something is good enough to ship.

But there's a bigger gap than I expected between "an AI can build it for me" and "I can finish something together with an AI". The single thing that closed that gap the most was GitHub.

I knew about GitHub. I just wasn't using it

Developers know GitHub inside out. I knew it existed — "the place where programmers keep their code" was about the depth of my understanding.

So at first I didn't use it. I thought: I'm not a developer, and I'm building this through conversation with an AI, so I probably don't need it. That was the mistake.

What GitHub is, for non-developers

As I understand it now, GitHub does three things at once:

A place to keep the code. There is always exactly one latest version. No more "wait, which file was current?"
A history of changes. What changed, when, and why. You can always go back
A record of the work. "I want to do this", "this is broken" become Issues you discuss and close. The reasoning survives

Obvious to a developer, I'm sure. But the important thing for a non-developer is that none of those three exist inside a conversation with an AI. Anything that lives only in the chat disappears when the chat ends. The AI doesn't remember last time — and when it thinks it does, it's often wrong.

Why you need it from day one

Work with an AI for any length of time and all of this will happen:

The AI says "we decided X last time" and it isn't true
Something you fixed quietly reverts
The file gets too big to paste into the chat
Neither of you can say where the project actually stands

All of these come from the same root cause: nobody has decided where the truth lives. Put GitHub at the centre and the answer becomes fixed — the truth is on the main branch, the history is in the Issues. You can tell the AI "go look here", and you can reassure yourself the same way.

Add GitHub late, on the other hand, and you have to migrate everything scattered across old conversations. I ended up doing exactly that. Starting with it would have cost nothing.

What using GitHub actually looks like for a non-developer

You don't have to do everything a developer does. Here is my entire workflow:

Tell the AI in chat, in plain Japanese, what I want or what's broken. The AI turns that into a properly structured Issue
Look at the diff of the PR the AI produces, and at the preview site
If it's fine, say "merge it". If not, say what's wrong in chat and let the AI file it

I never touch the command line. The AI handles branches. It still works. Deciding where the truth lives is the substance; learning the tooling comes second.

About this series

Everything that follows sits on top of this foundation: getting the connection working (01), trusting the AI's memory and paying for it (02), server plumbing (03), writing rules (04), the hard parts (05), and the monetisation wall (06). Read in order, you'll see why GitHub comes first — failures included.

Series: "I wish I'd known this from the start"

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