Your first app is going to look like shit

Your first app is going to look like shit. That's fine.

When you're non-technical, the prompts are vague, the design details are missing, and the output shows it. You learn to be specific, or the AI guesses.

Then there's all the stuff you have to set up just to make it work. Expo to build the iPhone app. TestFlight to get it on my phone. Supabase for logins and data. GitHub, because that's where the code actually lives. Netlify to run the backend. OpenAI to turn my voice into a recap. A Mac mini where my coding bots build the whole thing while I talk to them. Figuring out what all this shit even is turned out to be half the fun. Then the real roadblocks show up.

Mine was the sign-in loop. I literally couldn't log into my own app to see if any of the fixes worked. Turns out my mail app was opening the login link and burning it before the app could use it. We switched to a code you type in. I was sitting there wondering if I'd ever get into this fucking thing.

AI is really smart now. I spend a lot of my days talking into my phone figuring out which prompts work. The biggest shortcut I found: ask the AI to write the prompt for you. Don't paste someone else's prompt and expect the same result. You learn AI by using it, not by reading everybody else's prompts.

So I get one thing right at a time. Baby steps. I've been building a voice dictation app for CPG field reps, beverage and beyond, for a week now. Step one was getting dictation working and making the recap sound professional. That works. Step two, which just went live, is having AI read shelf photos, count competitor products and pull pricing to go with the voice recap. Then a little prompting guide so reps remember what to talk about.

I can't stand looking at the app. But the main thing it's supposed to do works.

After years of CRMs, I don't want a hundred menus and dropdowns just to get a product into a report. Talk it through, get in and out.

The fun part is you get to go against every app you've ever used and put your own ideas forward.

Function first, design later. You can always go back to your inspiration. For me that's Wispr Flow and Monologue. I dictated this whole post in Monologue so AI could write it in my voice, then I edited what came out.

You do all this work to make things easier, and once the AI has all your context, everything starts to fly.

That's when the work gets fun. Like, really fun. Then you're hooked. You want to finish every project because you want to see how it all turns out, and the results are amazing.

What a time to be alive.

Who else out there is building something, struggling through it, and loving every minute?