kaito
@kaito
here's how and where I used AI to build v1 of SuperPrompt. I spent ~20 hours on it from idea to sharing it here. not as glamorous as some vibe coding threads but I think it's a solid look at where it shines. added some general notes at the end. start: initial spec - my father in law told me about a sick prompt he found to practice languages and it was a gamechanger. then my friend saw ghibli pics and asked what he needed to type - hm it would be cool to make a site where you can find good prompts for anything - I brain dumped my idea into Grok and told it to ask clarifying questions and poke holes - jammed with it to narrow down a v0 list of functionality - I confirmed the tech stack I wanted to use - I asked it to write a spec for Cursor. 👉 this took about 20 min total. from start to detailed spec continued below
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kaito
@kaito
Naming - I wanted to do this first because my experience with previous projects is that it’s annoying to set everything up (repo, db, auth providers) with a temporary name and changing everything later. I was confident I’d finish this project so it was worth it. - Brainstormed with ai while looking for available domains. Working from both ends, what makes sense and what’s available. - Ai sucks at naming but it lets you quickly see what you don’t want 👉 this took ~30 min? Not exact cus I think I also thought about it while doing dishes or something
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kaito
@kaito
building - I tried to 1 shot it by putting the whole spec into Cursor, it generated a ton of promising files but it got stuck installing dependencies lol - so I broke it into chunks the same way I would do it without AI - I used Agent mode to set up the repo, that was fastest - then Composer to add chunks of functionality at a time. landing page, prompt grid with dummy data, auth, supabase integration with real data, search etc. 👉 needed some manual rewiring but overall much faster than doing it myself. about 4 hours to make ~80% of v0 exist. It felt basically done but little did I know.
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kaito
@kaito
rewriting - Composer started getting stuck so I decided to take over. Turns out the code was a mess, everything was in like 3 files. - I decided to refactor cus the code was confusing both me and Composer - tried to get Composer to refactor but it struggled, it would split components fine but didnt reliably move all the existing functionality - I decided to rewrite a bunch of the code. it was annoying cus the app worked but I knew it'd be hard to keep adding stuff. - Used Chat to get AI help while making more controlled changes. - This made me strip a few more features from v0. I originally had upvote and user submissions but the tech debt made me realize I didnt need those to ship something usable. 👉 spent ~3 hours rewriting the whole thing with sturdier code while rethinking some features.
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kaito
@kaito
Finishing - Now that the code was in good shape I started the last 20% of features - As usual that took a bunch of time. handling edge cases, details of various states, errors. Also changed functionality based on how it felt. - I was also figuring out the UI as I built it so it took some time finalizing how everything fit together. Went back and forth on a few things like how to visually highlight both prompts that output text vs images on the main page - Used grok/chatgpt to jam on these, mostly for thinking out loud. it was kinda helpful when it role played as target user personas to imagine how they would use the app - Then I was done. double checked security best practices with AI, added more prompts to the db and deployed it on vercel where I hooked it up to my domain. 👉 Spent ~10 hours on this
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kaito
@kaito
Total was around 20 hours all inclusive from idea to sharing it. AI was useful at basically every stage playing different roles. it sped things up drastically. even if the total amount of time taken wasn’t 10x less I was able to iterate and try more things so I ended up further. it also noticeably reduced mental load. the inertia of getting started or resuming is much lower. easier to get into flow state because anytime you hit an obstacle you can offload it. having it think while you do other stuff is also a boost. ya it was annoying to need to rewrite code but it was worth being able to see it 80% functional in a ridiculously short time. that let me see how the app I imagined in my head felt to use. I spent less time in the weeds and more time on thinking about what I wanted.
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