I cried twice building this. I'd do it again
After DeckGuard, I was hooked. That night I lay in bed again, asking GPT and Gemini the same question as before. "What else can I build?" This time something different caught my eye. A wellness card service. You type how you're feeling, and AI generates a beautiful card with a message from your future self.
I asked if I could really make this. They said it would take two days. I should have known by now that AI always lies about timelines.
The brand name came together fast. Tomorrow Me. The tagline wrote itself. "Tomorrow Me is waiting for you from the future." Even the button text, "Meet My Tomorrow," felt right. I wanted every detail to matter. The loading screen had to feel like a heartbeat, not a wait. So I designed it in soft pink tones to feel like anticipation, not frustration.
Then I discovered Manus.
META had just acquired Manus around that time, and I wanted to test it. So I gave the same instructions to both Manus and Claude at the same time. Claude gave me what Claude always gives. Clean, tidy, safe, forgettable. The kind of design you've seen a thousand times on free templates.
Manus was something else entirely. It looked like an Italian art student got drunk, decided to build a website, and accidentally broke the whole system. Everything was too intense, too bold, too much. Buttons in wrong places, functions missing, chaos everywhere. But it was beautiful chaos. I looked at Claude's version and thought, that's the ceiling. It will never get better than this. Then I looked at Manus and thought, this is insane, but I can shape it.
So I started shaping. Fonts, hero page layout, loading animations, card result pages, level designs, every tiny piece of copy. I rewrote and polished and rewrote again. Days passed. It was almost done.
Then Manus lost its mind.
The card images wouldn't come out right no matter what I did. I went back and forth between GPT and Gemini, rewriting prompts over and over. Fix one thing, something else breaks. Fix that, two more things break. On day 7 of fine-tuning, Manus suddenly rolled back to 10 hours ago. Ten hours of work, gone. Just like that. I cried. I kept working through the tears until morning.
Every day I slept during the day and worked through the night. Every night I told myself just a little more, just a little more. On day 9, Manus rolled back again. Five hours gone this time. I cried again and kept going. I didn't want to stop. Stopping felt like losing.
Then something shifted. After those two big rollbacks, the small ones stopped scaring me. And the image style I'd been fighting against started looking different. Wait, this is actually pretty? Maybe this is better than what I originally wanted? The night I thought that, I slept well for the first time in over a week.
Ten days of fine-tuning later, Tomorrow Me was finally complete.
The thing about DALL·E 3 that nobody tells you: it can't understand negative words. If you say "no red," it hears "red." It has no concept of numbers or percentages. And if you give it too many instructions at once, it just does whatever it wants. 80% of my fine-tuning time was spent fighting DALL·E. Controlling AI image generation perfectly is impossible. You learn to negotiate instead.
I wanted every card to be beautiful, even at the lowest emotional level. The messages aren't advice or lectures. They're personal, warm, like a future version of you already knows what you're going through and just wants to tell you it's going to be okay. That took more testing and adjusting than everything else combined. None of it happened by accident.
After all that, I wanted to feel proud. And I did, for about a day. Then I started thinking about the next service.
→ Try Tomorrow Me: tomorrowme.kr
Next up: I built a 19th-century literary salon on the internet. With a golden door knocker.
