My Experience using AI to Code
How to Build an App Without Any Coding Skills:
ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Replit, V0, Bolt, Lovable
It always starts with and ends with a great idea.
For some it's not getting the funding they need to go to market for others its not being able to find any customers.
For me it was not being able to code. I am a tinkerer who likes to build things. My ideas would start as a vision and end as a sketch on a piece of paper.
I remember when that day changed, when Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Artifacts.
Using AI to Build Software
If you've ever used no-code tools like Framer or Bubble you know how easy and difficult those tools can be. Using Claude with Artifacts bridged that gap for me. I took a picture of one of my old sketches, uploaded into Claude and wrote a few sentences on what the app was, its features, and how it functions. In less than a minute I had a demo of the product in front of my on my computer screen. It was amazing. The AI was even able to read my awful handwriting and labeled each menu item exactly how I had it my sketch. On top of that it even add icons for item. My world had changed just a few months ago I was laughing at AI now I was laughing with it as we prepared for success.
I clicked a few buttons on the app and nothing happened. Wait, this thing cant predict what each feature does? That's fine I'll tell it what it does. Uh oh my first error. Why does the app look different now that I gave it more information about how it should perform. Just 10 minutes ago I was preparing for a ProductHunt launch. Why am I now preparing to toss my computer out the window.
AI vs No Code can best be described as Skiing vs Snowboarding.
- AI = Skiing: easy to pick up but hard to master
- No-Code = Snowboarding: hard to pick up but easy to master
Keep that in mind when you start your next project.
Comparing AI Tools
Unfortunately, AI is not yet a Do-It-All Tool. There are limitations to what you can build with AI. Those limitations are shrinking everyday and tools like Cursor & Replit allow you to edit AI generated code.
Below I break down each tool I have used and what its best for.
👨🏫 ChatGPT: The Professor
It has all the answers but it wont do the work for you. It will make you work your results. Like a professor it will teach you everything you need to know along the way. If I wanted to learn how to code, this would the tools I would use. It gives you step by step instructions on how to build your software product.
⛏️ Claude: The One Tool Quiver
Artifacts will make you feel like a Superhero. You can type out what you want and see it being built in front of your eyes. This is the tool I recommend for everyone. I like to use Claude on my phone, whenever I have an idea, I use the voice feature to describe the product and watch as it gets built. I've used this feature countless times while on a hike.
🎨 V0: Your Design Agency
V0 was developed by Vercel and uses a lot of ShadCN components. At first I would use this tool to design a product then upload the design in Claude to add features. You can now do all of that within V0. Don't sleep on V0 is is vastly underrated.
🦸♂️ Bolt: The Superhero
I've never felt more powerful using Bolt.new. It taught me a lot about development - setting up files structures, integrating a backend, deployment, etc.
👨💻 Lovable: Your AI Team
Combine everything from all of the other tools and stuff it into one tool and you have Lovable.dev. Loveable even lets you edit the code it generate in browser it is truly a powerful tool.
🎮 Replit: Gamifying Coding
Replit is a fun tool to use and it has a great community. This is a learners tool. Replit has something no other AI tool offers, a marketplace. Bounties allow you to hire developers to build or implement features.
💼 Cursor: The Professional
If you are looking to build software and know how to develop applications Cursor will help you develop your project faster. It's that simple, it makes developers lives easier.
My Learnings
While I loved that AI could get ideas from my head into a digital product, the ideas were always 60-80% fleshed out. From someone who know how to code I can see the power of AI. For the rest of us, AI is still just a fun toy.
I still have a blast designing , visualizing and interacting with product concepts. These ideas can be shared with friends to show what is possible. I will continue to hack away on my ideas until the day a full fledged app can be built with a voice command.
If you have started a project with an AI tool you can contract a freelancer on sites like Fiverr or Upwork. Just upload your app design and describe what features you want. This will get many closed to their dreams of launching a product or starting a company.
Additionally, there are product and MVP agencies who can build you a project from the ground up. While the quality of the work is usually great the costs can be high.
Neither one of these solved the issue I was faced with which is why I built Atlas:Labs.
Atlas:Labs
Introducing Atlas:Labs (builtwithatlas.com).
We specialize in completing AI Projects, Prototyping, Wireframing, UI/UX, Design, and Full-Stack Development.
If your like me and like to tinker with new tools and visualize your ideas. Feel free shoot me an email at [email protected]
I wrote code to remove background noise from audio and deployed on my website. All the code was written by AI because I am not able to write such advanced code yet.
I fall in the category where its easy to code but difficult to sell and market. Hope some AI tool would really help me do that. ChatGpt is helping a lot but it will be even more helpful if I get a more specific tool for that or a human is even better 😅
If someone knows any tool specific to selling and marketing please mention it here😊 thanks
Me too. Hardest part so far.
@prabal @MatteoBarberis - where have you tried launching your products?
Product Hunt, Reddit, Some paid advertising. I haven't launched many products yet, but I usually use different tools for different jobs. I'm about to launch a social media website and I'm going to try a different strategy with it. Possibly automatic Linkedin DMs, Sending thousands of emails to leads scraped through Apollo or Instantly. If I built an app probably TikTok influencers but I just find it hard generally to find good leads. Do you have any suggestions for me?
For social media where the audience is b2c tiktok is your go to
I have a lot of experience in cold outreach coming from a sales background. It’s not fun, it’s time consuming but low cost.
I’m now focused on building a community around my niche (micro-SaaS)
I'm thinking of doing cold emails outreach using something like Apollo or Instantly but the thing is they're so expensive.
Similar to @MatteoBarberis I am trying lot of platforms. its difficult to get a response even for a small 2 min survey 😅. Currently, I am validating my idea and figuring out whatever the feature I am building(as a part of MVP) will bring some value to the customer. The survey was around the same, to vote and rate the most valuable feature. Any pro tip?
@prabal happy to help - shoot me an email [email protected]
Thanks for your help, @dimitrithomas. I will send you an email soon with more details and specific questions.
I'm about to launch a tool which helps with marketing by building your plan and helping you deploy this. Powered by ai but I have 20 years marketing experience so have very tightly managed the build
I feel this. I love building but getting the app in peoples hands is ... hard!!!!
yes! what are you building?
This was a great read, Dimitri! Really resonated with your journey of turning sketches into functional prototypes with AI. The skiing vs. snowboarding analogy is spot on—AI makes it feel like you're flying through the build process until you hit a roadblock and realize there’s still a learning curve.
I’ve also been experimenting with AI-driven development, and while it's incredible for rapid prototyping, there's still a gap when it comes to fine-tuning and production-ready applications. Your breakdown of tools like Claude, V0, and Bolt is super helpful—definitely going to check out Atlas:Labs!
Curious—how do you see AI evolving in the next year? Do you think we’ll get closer to true no-code AI app development, or will manual intervention still be essential?
@saasbuilder7694 thanks!
I think manual intervention will always be required - we all have our own stylistic preferences. I really like what Lovable is doing with Visual Edits.
I talk more about the Future of AI here: https://searchepreneur.substack.com/p/finding-hidden-opportunities-in-ai
Next week ill dive in more..
I read your post and now I know more about those AI tools. You said that using Claude to upload a sketch can get a product demo really fast. That's so cool! But I'm kind of wondering, if I want to take the basic structure that AI made and change things like the business logic to make the product fit my own needs better, how hard would that be?
sounds like you already have a project which is built or semi-built - you would probably want to upload the files into Replit or Cursor to alter the business logic
What a great read! 🤩
thanks! glad you enjoyed it
This is a great article! I have built 3 swift apps with some CS knowledge and the help of Chatgpt. I am excited to give these other tools a try
thanks! please share your experience with them
I am an ex-FAANG SDE, and I have a lot of experience building global high-traffic systems. I got bored of active coding but still wanna build products.
I fall into the category that uses Cursor+Claude. I have also subscribed to Claude Pro and Google workspace business+Gemini and my meetings, product research/designs has been supercharged.
I like being able to chat with your terminal with the live context of your workspace (I know git/terminal commands but I don't wanna rack my brain to remember a vague command or flag), or being able to specifically direct Cursor on specific best practices while implementing the code and not leave it to an LLM generative/probabilistic chance.
I just started designing/building SAASFoundry, an open-source framework (not boilerplate) to help you launch a B2C SAAS app instantly with few configurations. I intend to use it to quickly prototype my SAAS+AI ideas but while thinking through it, I realized the public might also need it.
very cool thanks for sharing, where can we learn more about SaaSFoundry?
They seem really ok for testing small ideas, don't know if it can really handle difficult tasks
100% - it will be interesting to see what this looks like in the next 2-3 years
Thanks for sharing your experience and introducing some new tools! I’ve tried Artifact and v0, and they’re fantastic—especially for testing out ideas and visualizing how they might look. They truly amazed me
glad to hear!
My biggest challenge so far is to find a tool that integrates with GitHub and open and execute an already-made project. From there, start making some modifications to the code and also, be able to add new features. That would be a game-changer for anyone!
I believe you can do this with Cursor - command "fork and run this repo locally {github_link}"
Hi Fabri, can you explain your use-case further? I just started building SAASFoundry an open-source framework (not boilerplate) to help you launch a B2C SAAS app instantly with few configurations. Does this match your use-case.
hello, yes, I can explain. Every platform to build a web app is like yours: you start building a web app from scratch using AI. That's great! But what about projects you have already built and have them running on your server, you have the code in the GitHub repository? I want to open those and keep the development without the need of more programmers, I want to use prompts to keep the development. Can you help?
Cursor can integrate with your existing code from github and help you add more features. If you don't need additional engineers, I will assume you are also an engineer because you will need to have some knowledge on how to prompt it correctly and to also review the AI generated code and verify the new behaviours.
Is this a tool similar to Vercel, but open and not limited to any specific tech stack?
Thanks for sharing your experiences. One thing I’d love to see explored more is the challenge of scaling an app built with AI tools. While getting a prototype or MVP off the ground is incredible, how do these tools fare when the product needs to handle more complex workflows, user data, or integrations?
Also, it might be interesting to touch on how AI tools handle accessibility in design. For instance, can they generate interfaces optimized for inclusivity, or does that still require manual tweaking?
these are great points - some of these tools like Lovable use scalable databases so in theory it could be possible. I think well see more integrations in the future which should make this 100% possible
Too bad cursor doesn't do Android development. The whole copy paste workflow for chat based LLMs is such a drag.
hopefully coming soon!
Cursor is wow! Before I was using gpt and claude, but cursor really increased the productivity
@searchforlexy have you tried Replit?
The thing about using AI to code is that AI can code everything, it’s just that we need to tell it every little thing we want, as AI lacks imagination to be able to make the website. Instead, we should use AI to generate small bits of code and use it to get our basic stuff done, like getting a HTML boilerplate coded in seconds rather than having to link my JS and CSS file while typing.
I agree, I think we are getting closed with editors that allow you to visually select a part of the generated software to edit
AI tools are revolutionizing app development, making it easier for creators to turn ideas into prototypes without coding.
Yeah, I think this will actually increase demand for developers
hi dimitri, I see that you’ve tried almost every AI coding tool on the market. If there were a product similar to Lovable, but capable of generating end-to-end software—especially one that could create backend databases—would you be willing to give it a try?
Our team is working on exactly such a product! And we’re developing our own proprietary model for it.
absolutely!