Building Web Apps with AI
A step-by-step guide for a shliach building a small app or site with AI: deciding whether to build, writing the first prompt, testing, hosting, linking it to a ChabadOne site, phone apps, and the mistakes members made.
On this page
This page is the practical version of Vibe Coding: how to go from an idea to a working link that people in your community can use. It assumes no programming background.
Before you build
Ask three questions first. Members who skipped them built things nobody used.
- Does something already do this? Check Community-Built Chabad Apps and the App Store. A member in May 2026 compared the cost of maintaining his own display-calendar app with a ready-made service at about $600 a year and kept the service.
- Will people actually open it? When a shliach asked for a full Chabad House phone app in June 2026, others replied that texting already works and few people download an app for one shul.
- Does it hold private data or money? If yes, the group's rule is that a real developer reviews it before launch. See the standing rules.
Step by step
1. Describe it in one paragraph. Who uses it, what they do on it, and what it must never do. Then hand it to the tool with a prompt like this:
I want to build a simple web page for my Chabad House. Here is what it
should do: [one paragraph]. Who will use it: [who]. It must work well on
a phone. It must not ask anyone to create an account, must not store
names, phone numbers or emails on a server, and must not take payments
(link to [our existing donation page] instead).
Before writing any code, ask me up to five questions about anything that
is unclear, then show me a short plan. Wait for my OK before you build.
2. Pick a tool. For a first try, Lovable builds and hosts in one place. If you plan to keep and grow the site, Claude Code puts the code in your own GitHub repository, where you can move it later. The tools and October 2026 prices are compared on Vibe Coding and The Builders Group.
3. Test it like a user. Open it on two or three phones, an iPhone and an Android, on the shul Wi-Fi. Try it with real-looking data: a long Hebrew name, an empty field, a date after shkiah. The Megillah app's lag only showed up when shluchim tested it in their shuls.
4. Ask for a security review. One member's advice from 2026: if you build with Claude Code, "you simply ask it how it can improve the security." A prompt:
Review this project for security and privacy as if you were a careful
outside developer. List anything that could expose personal information,
let a stranger change data, or leak a key or password. Explain each
problem in plain English and how serious it is. Do not change any code yet.
This catches obvious problems. It is not the same as a developer's review, which the rules still require for logins, databases of people and payments.
5. Put it online. Builders such as Lovable host it for you. For a Claude Code project, the setup members recommended in August 2026 is to push the code to GitHub and connect the repository to Vercel or Netlify, which publish it automatically; each branch gets its own preview link. Check the free-plan limits on The Builders Group first: Vercel's free plan is for personal, non-commercial use.
6. Connect it to your Chabad House site. ChabadOne pages are hard to customize directly. A July 2026 tip: put the new site on a subdomain of your main address (for example, events.yourchabad.org), and ask the AI both what to set up on the hosting side and what to ask ChabadOne support for. Other options are on ChabadOne Integration.
7. Plan who will edit it. If someone in the office needs to change text and photos, set up an editor such as Pages CMS before handing it over. See Letting someone edit a site Claude built.
8. Keep versions. Number your releases and keep the last one that worked. The Esther reader that broke on Purim day failed after a round of fixes, not before.
Phone apps
Most community tools are websites that work on a phone, and that is usually enough. A website can be added to the home screen; on iPhones, a site's notifications only work after you do that, which the CountOmer builder found out in April 2026.
If you need a real app in the stores:
- Ask the AI to build it with React Native or Flutter, which make iPhone and Android versions from one codebase (a member's advice, August 2026).
- The Apple Developer Program costs $99 a year. Apple waives the fee for organizations recognized as nonprofits in their region, if the app does not sell digital goods (Apple's fee-waiver page).
- Google Play charges a one-time $25 registration fee (Google's help page).
- As of August 2026, members reported that a custom app cannot write into ChabadOne.
If your site is on Wix or Webflow
You do not have to leave your current platform. Webflow and Wix both publish official MCP connections that let an AI assistant work on a site you already have (Webflow MCP, Wix MCP). In July 2026 members warned that Squarespace has no official one, and that unofficial connectors should be reviewed by someone who knows what they are doing. More on connectors: MCP and Connectors.
Sometimes a script beats an app
Not every problem needs an app. Two patterns members liked:
- Have the AI write a script instead of processing your data itself. A script only works on the data you give it, so it cannot invent rows. A shliach used this for year-end donation receipts in Google Sheets (July 2026). Ask the AI to explain exactly how to run it.
- Google Apps Script inside the spreadsheet. In August 2026 an AI suggested an Apps Script attached to a sheet to post calendar events and send reminders, instead of a full agent.
What members built, and what to learn from it
- A full Chabad House website built from scratch with Claude Code, with events pulled from a campus portal and every form routed through Google Apps Script (July 2026).
- A daycare and after-school system (registration, digital signatures, family billing, payment plans) built with Claude Code in "a week of evening sessions" in July 2026. An app that holds children's records and billing is exactly the kind the group's rules send to a developer for review before it goes live.
- In October 2026 a member with no coding background rebuilt a ten-year-old software project in five hours on a Friday afternoon with Lovable. He had paid three developers for it before, and it had failed. One person's report; it shows how fast a prototype can come together, not how it holds up a year later.
- The Megillah app: free, no accounts, shipped in ten days.