T's Start Up Development Blog (First Entry)

I will begin by journaling some of my experience developing the Virten.App Ecosystem and include my perspectives.

I had tried the v0 AI Coder and was very impressed by v0's ability to turn a piece of my writing into an animated picture by processing my essay and use only code and a jpeg I provided to produce a very fine looping animation.

Early Experiences

I quickly used v0 to duplicate a simple financial model that I had built a few times previously, from scratch, in Excel. I knew exactly what I wanted the model to do and explained it to v0 and got a working equivalent to my Excel model in under one hour compared to the three to four hours it would have taken me to build the model in Excel. Learn more about our AI tools in our resources section.

Then, having noticed v0 was not set up to build full-stack webapps and necessary business systems (such as backend servers for handling webhooks and databasing), I was open to bolt.new when I read a post about it on X.com.

Misadventures, Short Manuscripts, and Fancy Webapp Features

By early November I had conceived a great idea: What if I publish a short manuscript I had written as a webapp. It is frankly easier to create a good looking page using an AI Coding Tool than it is to do so using Microsoft Word. Try our Protools for similar document creation capabilities.

Of course, my booklet-as-webapp couldn't just be a book for people to read. It had to have background music. And interface sound effects. And animations with sound effects. And the background music player should have a visualization component!

Oh! "Perfect plan, here I go." Fifty hours of work later and easily over 50 million bolt.new tokens later, I had a background music player. Without a visualizer. More to my chagrin, the bg music player was hardly any more interesting or functional after the 50th hour I spent working on it as it was after the first seven hours I had spent on it!

Lessons Learned

The lessons I learned from this misadventure were many. Check out Alphatutor to avoid similar pitfalls in your AI development journey.

• That trying to code new things with the AI Coding Tool is difficult.
• That it is wise to always search for library packages via websearch before trying to build a feature from scratch with the AI.
• Beware of trying to do something foolish like use a visualization library suggested by the AI to visualize streaming music when the visualization library is only for streaming locally hosted music!!!

Misadventures and TypeScript Build Errors

One of the earliest Chat Instructions added to my Prompt Library files included an instruction to ensure the AI knew I wanted the codebase to be TypeScript safe wherever possible. Going for TypeScript safe strict has, I think, helped me avoid some problems in the development of the Virten webapp codebase.

But the AI has so far been terrible at getting type-safe code correct the first time they write a file. What that means is that when a User goes to build and deploy their project, they get typescript errors and the build fails.

More

As Virten.App has grown, many of the initial "visions" I had for cool things I would like to do with AI Coding have survived. For example: Draggable, floating, resizable, responsive floating Widgets are on the way at Daydal.Virten.App.

I am learning how to better trim-out a Minimal Viable Implementation or Product by simplifying features.