John Rush
@johnrushx
Today, I gave the Replit AI Agent a Real test. I built an Employee Vacation tracker app. 100% AI prompting, no code. I hated the process until I mastered it. The app I built is so cool that I bought a domain to let you all use it for free. Every step, with great details 🧵:
1. I described my app in a prompt. The more detailed the prompt, the better. - asking for ReactJs and Shadcn helps to make things look pretty - asking for data persistence helps to output a real fullstack app connected to a database instead of just a demo - cover big picture
2. Instead of asking it to build the final app right away, it turns out it's better to iterate with versions. Whenever I asked for too many things, it failed to deliver. So after my initial generation, I started prompting it by grouping similar tasks.
3. It produced the UI that looked good, but I wanted to change it. I tried asking it for a visual change and it messed up the whole thing. I tried it few more times and gave up and rolled back all the UI changes. At this point I was about to give up, but then I tried smth new
4. I sketched a quick mockup of what I wanted and attached it to my prompt. It saved my experiment. Suddenly, the whole UI changed to what I wanted. @amasad, maybe you need some native UI sketching tool inside the agent. It'd solve a lot of the problems.
5. As I was prompting it more and more, the app became pretty complex and replit started failing at fixing the bugs. It went into an annoying loop 😠 e.g. it couldn't fix the issue of adding a new vacation. Then I came up with a pretty smart idea that I'm proud of :)
6. I asked to log more info into console, so it's easier to understand the error. From that moment, I started asking it to log literally anything i could log and the whole endless never bug fixing loops stopped and it fixed all the bugs right in the next try 😵💫😍
7. My next steps were repetitive: > I'd ask for few new features > test them, report bugs > then get them fixed > then ask for more features....
8. It all took me 2 hours. I got exactly what I wanted. It would have taken a week with a human developer to build, iterate, develop UI/UX, test, improve and get exactly what I got here. Use it 100% free: https://trackvacations.com/ Reply with feedback, I'll pass it to the agent
9. That's it. I plan to try all other AI Agents & Ai Developers. I'll build a micro product with each and share my findings. The next in line are Windsurf, Cursor and 14 more. Besides being excited about AI in coding, I'm also building these startups: ↳ https://unicornplatform.com ↳ https://listingbott.com ↳ https://seobotai.com ↳ https://devhunt.org ↳ see the rest on http://johnrush.me
