Building with Imagination

It’s never been a better time to be a storyteller. From the start, AI has had the power to amplify an idea. Turning a one-liner into a requirements document, a vision into an image, an idea into 5 similar or adjacent ideas. Over the past 4-6 months, a new crop of tools has arisen that take this concept to the next level. These tools allow you to turn an idea into a high quality app, prototype or website with stunning results. Tools like Replit, Bolt and Lovable are some of the fasting growing startups in any industry. In fact, a16z just released their first market map and guide to for AI-powered web app builders.

Heres what you need to understand - this technology isn’t just for app builders or tinkerers. It’s for anyone with an idea to iterate on or a story to tell. Its a mechanism for amplifying thoughts. I’m here to help you understand what is possible and how best to align technology to the stories you want to tell. There are different levels of AI prototyping and development, depending on technical proficiency and app needs - Lenny’s Newsletter lays it out well:

I’ve spent the last couple weeks building test apps with Replit Agent. Its an incredibly satisfying experience. As someone who has never been short of ideas but always felt incapable of turning those ideas into a reality due to lack of real coding experience. But now, the state of the art LLMs are now able to interpret ideas and translate them into code. These tools don’t just create a UI or Figma prototype, they create a fullstack application, database, and can be used as a production app.

I’ve been experimenting with putting aside my beloved powerpoints and walking into meetings with a fully functional app to demo. Here is the process I follow:

• It starts with an idea, a problem statement or an audience

• I begin by discussing with ChatGPT and having it flush out the idea, recommending features and capabilities that could address it

• Once I feel like the idea is properly formed, I have ChatGPT build me a base prompt for Replit as well as a feature roadmap

• I then go into Replit, start with the base prompt and layer on additional features one-by-one

• Replit continuous asks for feedback, makes a lot of mistakes, rolls back when it makes mistakes and continues building.

The entire process is incredibly satisfying. Below is an app I made in 18 minutes for a meeting I had (sped up to 20x for your sake). You can see us iterating together as we build it and layer on features:

And here is the final app:

Things I learned in the process:

1. Iteration is key: You need to break your idea down into the smallest possible components and feed them in one at a time. These apps thrive on feedback and “chunking” of requests

2. ChatGPT is a great copilot: You want to bring a fully formed roadmap to tools like Replit or Bolt and ChatGPT is great for iterating to get to that point. For example, I asked ChatGPT to research a company i was speaking to and incorporate their brand colors and designs into the roadmap

3. The “Jagged Edge” is unclear: There are things that intuitively seem like they should be easy like adding an image that end up being hard, and then things that are hard like building an entire authentication system, that end up being easy.

4. Web apps are more complicated than I appreciated: Seeing how Replit designs an entire front-end and back-end system and then releases it into produiction was incredibly educational. The way it obfuscates the need for me to design any of it is greatly appreciated

5. Harness the creativity of these apps: I was really impressed with how Replit actually suggested features I hadn’t thought of. It wasn’t always great, but its the equivalent of a mid-tier product engineer on my team

Go forth and experiment, its never been easier or more satisfying!