Building a Production App with AI: Day 1/n - The Journey Begins

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Last week, I promised to walkthrough building a production grade application purely vibe coding my way and there was way more interest than I anticipated.

Working with AI for developing software is challenging to say the least. While Lovable, bolt.new, Cursor, Claude Code and many others promise the power of AI Coding through natural language, ensuring that they are production-grade (another way to say you're confident that you can charge the users, and it won't backfire) is a whole another game.

Today, the mission starts. I'll be spending about an hour every day and make steady progress. I'll document everything I am doing, and share it in a newsletter in plain text format. Once in a while, where it warrants, I'll share a screen recording. I will ensure to do what it takes to get the point gets across.

The idea?

For a long time, my hands were itching to build a minimalistic blog writer - one that helps me write distraction-free. And this has to be just for writing, nothing else - not a newsletter, not a blogging platform, or anything else.

I wanted it to be a place where I can go to, to write things, save them, and copy paste to some place else - like a Substack, Corporate blog, LinkedIn, etc. The focus is on writing your thoughts out, with some basics met. This is the project I will build in public step by step - from ideation all the way through taking it live.

Today, I've spent about 45 minutes in the morning brainstorming with AI - to create a specification of what I want to even build in the first place. I did it with Claude, because of many reasons.

- Claude Artifacts help me iterate better.
- Claude Models are great.
- Claude UI is way-less cluttered to use.
- Claude responses are usually much less robotic than other models.

Also, I did not conduct market research on this idea - may be something similar exists already, but largely unlikely, because over time, we are learned to create complexity through software, not simplicity. I believe AI is here to reverse that trend through micro-SaaS.

Here's the full chat: Claude | Claude

Here's the spec I was able to create: Minimalistic Blog Writer - Project Specification | Claude | Claude

I'll cross post this journey here, and on my Substack. If you prefer, you can subscribe there (link in comments).

Happy building.