Wait, Did We Just Finish This Thing??

12 days.

12 days, working an hour or two in the mornings and several over the weekend. That’s all it’s taken to build my app from scratch with the help of ChatGPT. When we got the iPad version dialed in just right a few minutes ago, I couldn’t believe it. A proper iPad app with the sidebar, too. (My app has always been iPad-able, but in that lazy, “just a blown up phone app” way.)

While I thought I was going to slide in just in time for my self-imposed July 15 app submission date, here I am on July 8 with nothing left to do for the MVP but add a launch screen and update the icon. I am beside myself (but in a good way)!

However, it wasn’t all roses.

Although I’m obviously very impressed with how well this worked out and probably did no more than 5-10% of the development work myself, I can confidently say these tools aren’t replacing software engineers any time soon. A person with little experience could not pull this off.

There were very few instances where I could take what ChatGPT gave me verbatim and get the results I wanted, usually only after several back and forth exchanges where I had to repeatedly coax the right code out of the model. I caught it making mistakes, using deprecated code, and suggesting implementations that were just plain wrong. I often corrected code and pasted it back into ChatGPT, to get it to write something that worked. Sometimes it was shockingly good – and sometimes it just needed to collaborate with an experienced engineer.

But, the MVP is good to go, a week ahead of schedule. I’m going to finish up these assets, submit the app for review, and start thinking about other features to work on next.