From idea to buildable components
1. From idea to buildable components
In this lesson we're gonna go from idea to buildable components on Replit, and so this lesson will be about planning out exactly what we're gonna build and we're gonna walk through our thought process for what we're creating. And we're gonna start towards creating our interactive form app with an admin panel and form editor. But first, we need to think from the user's perspective and write up some user stories. So who needs what? The end user needs to be able to submit responses easily in a really fast, friendly manner. The admins, ourselves need to be able to manage responses as well as sort them as we kind of demoed earlier. And finally, the system needs to be secure, scalable, and maintainable. What if we want to add additional admins where we want our coworkers to be able to use the same application? We have to translate these needs into features for our app. And so what we're gonna do is map those user stories to components. So for our feedback form, we need a dynamic form builder. For our response management, we need an admin dashboard with a Kanban view or just that act of dragging items between columns. And for our user experience, we want a clean, minimal and mobile friendly or responsive experience. So anybody can use this whether they're on the go or at their desktop. And so this is where a lot of new vibe coders get confused. What do we tell AI to achieve these outcomes? Well, in the plan phase of our four P process, we're translating our user stories into mappable components, and then we're pulling that into our application. So here's where I find most people get confused. It's once we've defined our requirements, what exactly do we tell AI? Well, the things you are responsible for when vibe coding are user experience decisions, business logic, and workflow design. The things we offload to AI or Replit are database structure, authentication setup, and implementation and styling details. We want AI to handle the specifics, just like our mechanic analogy from the introduction. So the magic question that we have to ask ourselves in order to prompt AI is: What does success look like for each user in that story that we just mapped? And that means that when we're prompting AI. We need to be descriptive, not prescriptive. We need to leave room for AI to surprise us or delight us, and we need to get the high level stuff right while not worrying too much about the details. This is exactly like micromanaging, right? And if we think about AI like a co-worker, you wouldn't tell someone exactly how to do something, you'd give them high level guidance and let them figure out the nitty gritty details, and then you'd refine with them as we move on. So if we're thinking about our form builder, there are really two components here. There's a UI and there's an admin dashboard. The UI is user facing. The admin dashboard is admin facing, right? And the feel that we're going for in this application is super lightweight and minimalist. What are some apps we could take inspiration from? Well, Typeform is a really good example, as is Notion. And this is really important with AI, if you can give concrete examples or guidelines to AI, it often gets much closer to what we're after. And so what we'll include in our V1, is actually a database and not that Kanban display or login, because that's getting into advanced functionality. And a core tenet of what we'll discuss in vibe coding is that we want to get to an MVP or minimum viable product without worrying about too much complex functionality. And why are we adding a database? Well, we need to store our user data somewhere. And often in production applications, developers would use what's called a database to store that data. So let's take a moment to think about what a prompt might look like for an application. And there's no right answer, so pause the video, write down your own prompt, and then we're gonna come back and I'm gonna talk through my prompt for this type of application, we can see what that looks like. So now we're gonna take a moment to break down a prompt and again, there are no right answers, but this is what I came up with. ‘I'd like to build a form for inbound requests. The form should ask for basic information, name, email, and additional information, and store it in a database.’ Note that we're being descriptive, not prescriptive. Though, we are mentioning that we want our data stored in a database. One of the amazing things about Replit is that we have databases built into the platform, so agent will actually be able to create a database and tie it directly into our application. Next, I'm giving specific design principles: ‘Make the form minimalist, and on-brand with my company, it should feature dark mode with the following accent colors.’ So now I'm defining how the form looks and that accent color there is actually a purple, so we're going for a dark theme with a purple accent. Finally, I'm asking agent to use web search for inspiration: ‘Do research on minimal form design and take inspiration from notion and Typeform. Structure the site for readability and use Inter as the font' because I like Inter as a font. Finally, I'm specifying some form behavior, ‘Ensure the form is minimalist, simple, and uses one page for each question with keyboard shortcuts and nice transitions’. So I'm being simple. I'm breaking the problem down, and really I'm thinking from first principles to specify exactly what I want from this output. Again, we're being descriptive, not prescriptive. We're explaining the outcome rather than the implementation. We're taking design inspiration from other visual styles and user experience patterns that we've seen online, and we're also applying smart constraints in our prompt, we're guiding without limiting AI's creativity. And finally, we're using context over commands. We're setting the stage for intelligent decision making in our models. So in this lesson, we learned about taking the first steps towards our application, which was coming up with the initial prompt. Now we're gonna head over to Replit. We're gonna submit that prompt, and then we're gonna talk about what comes next.2. Let's practice!
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