How (A)I built a simple Flutter app over a weekend with zero manual code!

I wanted to create a simple "Goal tracking" app for personal use. An app which will allow me to add goals and mark them manually whenever I achieve them. So I fired up Gemini CLI.

I don't remember the actual prompts nor does Gemini CLI save the history, but the initial prompt was something like this.

Prompt: "You are an expert Flutter developer. Create a simple "stock goal tracking" app to allow users to add manual goals. It should allow users to mark the goal as achieved."

Within a few seconds, it not only created the app but also added some built-in goals! But it used "shared preferences" ( a different storage usually for minor things). So I had to prompt it to use the sqlite database (personal preference).

                                                               

It also added a "Title" as well as "Description". So I had to prompt it to remove the Description field later. 

                                                               

I realized I also needed a way to delete goals. So just prompted "Add a feature to delete a goal". It "thought" and by itself decided that a swipe gesture to delete would be nice and went ahead and added that!

Then I asked it to move the "Add goal" option in the main screen/toolbar instead of it being in the overflow menu. Also prompted it to add a "About dialog". 

I did not like the built-in flutter icon. So asked it to "create an app icon based on this project". This is what it created.

It created an svg. I manually converted it to png

When I was happy with the overall app, I thought of taking it a step forward and ask for help in uploading it to the Play Store. Ofcourse it does not do it (yet), but it gave me all the steps required. I asked it to generate a short description and a full description based on the features.

Then I asked it to create screenshots based on various features of the app. It generated 3!

AI generated screenshot 1

AI generated screenshot 2

AI generated screenshot 3

A "feature graphic" was required for the Play Store, so asked Gemini (but it failed to create a simple image and created one with truncated text. Maybe I was lazy with my prompt. So I manually edited it)

Feature graphic (manually generated #GeminiFail)

Finally, it created the release build and showed me the file which I needed to upload to my Google Developer account!

Here I got a nasty surprise and realized that it had created a default "com.example" package name. So I had to prompt it to change the package name. It promptly did so.

The app creation process was smooth. I did not even open the files it created or inspect what it was doing. Did not even edit any file or fix any compilaton error. It all did by itself!

In fact, the biggest pain was navigating through the new Google Play Console UI and policy screens.


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PS: With AI creating apps in very less time, the number of Apps are only going to increase and "App" will no longer be a "moat". The content, user generated data, network effect will be a differentiating factor.

It feels like I have just outsourced my "developer brain" to the AI. I rarely write small pieces of logical code or algorithm! AI does it! It's just pure joy to "see" the AI "think", make mistakes, correct it and keep going while I do something else!

Will over reliance on AI cause us to lose our ability to think critically? Or will we adapt to a different level/kind of thinking! #CalculatorMoment


PS2: Please pardon any grammatical mistakes. 100% of this post was written by a human!

PS3: I already had all the necessary Flutter developer tools installed on my machine