Using AI to develop a modern web application is easier than ever at the time of writing, but there are still challenges.
The biggest one is cost, a lot of AI cloud services like ChatGPT and Google Gemini do have free tiers, but in the case of ChatGPT you quickly hit the upper limits of some of the more advanced features that are on offer before it becomes almost completely unusable, as it falls back to an older model.
When the fall back to old model occurs, you quickly experience hallucinations and the ai starts producing unpredicatable results.
I’ve had some success with both ChatGPT and Google GEMINI CLI, both seperately, and on the same project.
Here are a few recent examples of this:-
The following two apps are vite projects, with an attempt at creating a standard workflow with test cases, and modern tooling with src and build processes.
Ad-Amp
https://play.gigazarak.com/adamp/index.html
An mp3 player, supply your own tracks, run a build process to read album art from the files id3 info, if not, consult last.fm for album art and artist and track info, fallback to wikipedia if no results found. All using free API endpoints.
WrdHelpr
https://adamlemmo.github.io/wrdhelpr/
Enter the letters from your word game, and it will give you the excluded words that can be used in other word helping apps like Word Hippo, so you can cheat on your favourite word games! (use responsibly)
Answezzy?
https://answezzy.gigazarak.com/index.html
The following quiz app, was made on the fly with ChatGPT and time and effort, iterating again and again, copy and pasting code from the result of the chat responses, prompting, re-prompting, honeing crafting, dodging and weaving until the desired result was achieved. This app was made early in the AI craze, and was last updated in late September 2024, since then Chat GPT has gotten a lot more dev friendly, but again, free limits and fallback to older models, make the process one of dimishing returns, at least sessionally, when tokens reset and limits are lifted after periods of time, the process begins anew!
You still need to have some idea of what a web app is, how it’s structured, what processes can and should be applied to it, AI speeds all of this up a lot, to the point where GEMINI CLI even edits the code for you. This is a mixed bag, as when it’s right, it’s great, but when it makes mistakes, it can be catastrophic, but if you make sure you’ve set the project up with a git repo, then you can always roll back to the last good version.
