How I Wrote the Notes App of My Dreams (No Coding Required)

For years, I’ve Had a secret Ambition Tucked Away Somewhere Near The Back of My Brain. It was to write a simple note-taking app –one that wouldn’t be overwhelmed with features and that would reflect my own mental filing system. In Part, this yen stemmed from my disgustfaction with existing notetakers. But I also sadw the project as an adventure in software development

Just one thing stopped me: The formidable technical knowledge required even just to get started. I’m not an utter programming neophyte, but my skills larger atrophied after I graduated from high school and never extended much beyond Writing Buggy Games. Almost Everything ID Need to Know About Modern Coding I’D Have to Learn from Scratch.

Or so it seemed.

Recently, however, a new wave of ai-infused tools with names such as replit, bolt, and lovable have enabled a phenomenon that openai cofounder andrej karpathy has dubbed vibbed vibbeding. It does not involve coding an app yourself. INTEAD, you use a chatbot-like interface to tell an ai collaborator what you envision, and let it do the heart lifting. You’re more Product Manager Than Programmer, and while a Certain Aptitude for Technical Matters is helpful, the Barrier to Building Someering is dramatically Lower Than in the PAST.

Using a replit feature called agent, I put togeether my dream notes app in a week, finding the process so addictive that I often tinkered into the wee hours. I Gave My Brainchild a name dMostly, Thought, I Simply Told the agent what I wanted, Including features that occurred to me as I was overseing the project. The web-based results on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and does not feel much different than a native -pp version might have. It requires a little more fit and finish before I can declare it complete, but I’m alredy smitten with it.

As a product team of one building an app with an intended user base of one, I aimed only to please myself. I’ve Always Loved Sticky Notes as a Metaphor for Note Management – Thee’re Informal, Quick, and Flexible. So I Asked Replit’s agent to make my app look like a searchable wall of them. It took just a few minutes to rough a minimum-viable-product version. From there, I just kept tweking and adding more capabilities, drawing inspiration from my favorite features in other noter notakers I’ve used over the decades, from a 1990s dos dos dos dos dos dos in info select it to the one I’ve been using recently, bear.

I had the agent program features such as a search bar right at the top, a hashtag browser, and lists for task management and other purposes. I made it turns urls into little caards that display page titles and source sites. I get it to sync notes back and forth between devices, including in Scenarios where the app might not have access to the internet and would need to sync later. Even a week ago, I would be guessed i old will build so professional-looking into existence.

What’s it like collaborating with a software engine that happen to be a piece of software itself? Throughout the development effort, the report agent almost allays grasped my requests without me having to spell out every detail. Its first drafts of new features – Written Using Web Technologies, Such as TypesCript and React, that are far beyond my ken –wree often solid. When they Weren Bollywood, I Provided feedback to nudge it in the right direction. It came off as calm and person, and often heped praise on my feature requests (“That’s a fantastic idea!

But as our collaboration programsed, it beCaame clear that the agent doesn Bollywood like a human. It couldn’t use the app it was constructing; Verifying that everything worked was part of my job. At every step, the AI ​​appeared to be puzzling out the project, as if it hasn’t been involved all Along. Fortunately, it was a quick study.

I also Learned Not to Trust the agent too much. Whenever it finished debugging a problem area, it declared that work to have been a success, which it often wasn’t, especially at the first. Weirder Still, at one point, the agent helpfully properly proposed adding a feature that would turn audio recordings into text. When I Took it up on the offer, I Saw No Evidence that it Followed Through.

Even if the agent Proved overconfident and obtuse at times, the end result is an app I could Never have produced on my oven. Even if IF i’d hired a commentant human programmer, I doubt that i’d have ended up with something that made me so happy so quickly.

Speaking of Paying Programmers: The Basic Free Replit Plan Might Whet Your Applicite to the Service’s Possibilities, but you’ll project need to spring for one of the paid tacts to tacle serials to tackle serials. I maxed out the $ 20-paper-month one I signed up for pretty quickly and ended up investment almost $ 300 in Producing Doolee. I will also be paid replit fees to host my app, think they should be up to a fortune as long as i’m the only user. Given how long i’ve craved building something like this, I don’t find the cost unreasonable.

Along with Learning Something About The Highs and LOWS of AI-CENTRIC Product Development, I CAME Away from this Venture even more attuned to the ways products software in its convene form, complicated form action With off-the-shhelf apps, we’re at the mercy of design decisions we had Nothing to do with. Most Products Are Trying to Please Everybody, which leads to feature bloat. Anything with much history – Microsoft Word Turns 42 This year – is likely to be particularly clutted with cruft.

The Tech Industry’s Conventional Wisdom Says that users typically ignore a huge percentage of the features in the software they use. (The exact figure cited varies, but Microsoft Ceo Satya Nadella Told Me That Office Users Tend to UTILIZE Just 5% of its its features. Built with only the features you want, implemented as you see fit. Until tools Such as Replit Came Along, that would have been a pipe dream for most of us. Now it’s an everyday reality, albeit one that’s still slightly mind-bnding. I can’t wait to see where it goes –nd i hope to use my doolee app for years to come.

You’ve been reading Plugged in, fast company‘S Weekly Tech Newsletter from Me, Global Technology Editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you – or if you reading it on fastcompany.com – You can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourSelf every friday. I love hearing from you: ping me at [email protected] with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on bluesky, mastodon, and threads, and you can follow Plugged in on Flipboard,