Best AI Solutions For Building Web Apps

So, recently I’ve been trying to learn how to make professional websites for a side hustle I was on, but I didn’t want to start from zero, but rather something more focused. SO, the idea was, that I should ask an AI to build a generic website in the format that was most used for this specific side hustle and try to learn from the code the AI made, not In terms of best practices but how to make it work. And you must be thinking why didn’t you get a clone from GitHub? Well I didn’t have time to search for perfect similar models to learn from using the very same technologies my job asked me to work with. Sure I could learn the basics first and adapt it to everything, but that would require something I didn’t have: Time.

With that thought out of mind. How did I do it? Basically the prompts were a bunch of requisites for a generic website similar to what my client needed, then after generated I would analyze whatever the AI made and with my current knowledge from computers and programming, would search for solutions to errors unknown to me and would fix any compatibility or logical errors that weren’t to huge to affect the whole project. Cause if they were, I would ask for a redo from the AI like wtf honey, what is this crap? Then work with the alterations made by the AI. Specially cases of hallucination where the AI would grab a package from a specific URL that didn’t even exist, so it broke the entire project.

Anyway. Fixing the AI’s solutions was for me a way to easily learn the patterns of website creation, cause every problem would be roughly researched, fixed and the solution in itself would be adapted to the client’s needs. So that when I had more time, I could go through all of it again, this time from zero, to fully grasp the project and have better ways to develop it. But be warned that despite being capable of reproducing some code within the artificial intelligence, it’s still your responsibility to develop creative solutions to integrate the code, api, servers, database, ensure security, minimize errors, test and keep updating. Cause the AI doesn’t really care about all that, it ultimately want to please you.

Needless to say, you also need to know a little bit of computer science to understand what nonsense this robot is doing. If not, at least english, programming logic and in this case, know how the web works. Since most programming languages have a similar pattern and are almost all with words derived from the english language.

Now! Back to the AI, if tested 3 of them, Bolt.new, CreateAnything and Gemini. In my honest opinion. Bolt.new was interesting to work with cause it made easy files to integrate after downloading the project but I still had problems with packages from out of this world, some images used by bolt didn’t make any sense in the project, like putting images of weird houses instead of construction materials. There was also some issues with the generated content with bolt generating a bunch of stuff I didn’t ask for. Anyway, in this platform, if you are to use it, put all pre requisites under one prompt if you don’t wanna pay for more credits.

Now CreateAnything, it generated a nice, usable app, in this case I was using it for a mobile app so it might seem out of place for comparisson but regardless it did a good job with design, however, the functionality only worked superficially, all of the background interactions and connections to the api and database were forgotten. It’s not bad though, it can still save plenty of time when developing. But again, never forget to check the logic the AI used to develop.

Gemini was surprisingly the best of them. At least for me. It is weird that Gemini puts everything inside one code archive but if you have a general idea of the organization of web apps or apps in projects this shouldn’t be an issue since you can just copy the code to their respective places, add exports and organize it better, regardless of that. It works like a fine wine. But Gemini comes unfair here cause it doesn’t block the amount of prompts you can ask of it. So you can keep asking for fixes to some problems and functionalities if you yourself doesn’t understand it and can’t fix it through web search. You can also see all the “thought” process Gemini had and use it analyze the code or just learn more about things you never thought to do since sometimes it does pretty insane things. With that said, it’s not perfect, you just have more control over what’s being done, but gemini still hallucinates like the others and sometimes put elements of the app where they shouldn’t be, so you should still watch out for that. Not to mention the lack of awareness when you ask for a compound functionality that influences other elements of the app. It might not do the entire task or do it right. But since the goal here is to ease and learn things, you should work with gemini as a pair for programming, not just let it do everything alone.

To finish this, for all of them, check the compatibility of the packages used by the AI with the development environment, platform or requirements you have, if it needs upgrades of it even exists at all. Artificial Intelligence is very helpful tool for optimizing workflow and learning, but only if you know what you are doing. I wouldn’t use it as a magical solution for everything since not everything is so documented the AI can learn from, so use that brain of yours. Bye.