I love cooking, seeing all the ingredients come together and tasting the finished product. When I go out to eat, I like to order something that I can also make because I want to compare it. Does it taste as good? What ingredients did they use? How can my cooking be improved? While I have been on this coding journey, I have also been curious to compare the apps I built myself versus what AI could produce.

Here’s what I have discovered using Lovable.dev, Builder.io, Rocket.new and GitHub Copilot with ChatGPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Flash (for image generation). I have been looking under the hood to see the code the AI produced, what frameworks were used, and the designs implemented. I’ve also been building some new apps using vibe coding.

Continue reading

I have been learning to code and have really enjoyed the process. I have gone through various stages – fun, frustration, patience, and finally happy when the thing actually works the way I had imagined! For the 3rd project of my javascript course, I made a digital basketball scoreboard: https://bballscoreboard2.netlify.app/.

I took a design in Figma and turned it into a simple app. I’ve discovered its a multi-dimensional problem trying to figure out figma, html, css and javascript. Then you add in learning VS Code, Github and Netlify to host it! There was no vibe coding – I did it on my own and mostly avoided the use of AI. I have found that you need to be persistent and keep coming back to the problem over time. Try different things, look up things online, research, test it out and compare it back to the original design. In the end, I did use some AI help with Github copilot for a small CSS issue (oh they can be so fiddly!). That was more out of curiosity.

My goal is to become more technical and be able to build my own apps. I also see that the role of Product Managers are blending with developers and designers with the use of AI. ChatGPT classified me as upper level beginner developer given my background with python and other courses I’ve done. I’d love to be able to build my own apps, join hackathons as a developer and contribute to open source projects. It’s the start of a journey!