Building our MVP
1. Building our MVP
So we've already talked about our prompt. I've queued it up. We've already practiced building on Replit. We're gonna send this one off and see what we get. After we submit the first prompt, Replit will create a plan for our work. This will involve web search and a few interactions to get further context. So you might see Agent ask a few follow up questions. Then Agent will develop a visual preview, which is just front end code, so you can verify what the application will look like before we build out back-end functionality. You can request changes here, but I like this app design, so I'm gonna approve the plan. Then as Agent builds the app, you'll see Agent actually test the application by navigating to and using the app in a private browser environment. This is useful, but it might not catch everything, so we're gonna still need to test the application, but it takes us a long way towards a functioning app and removes some of the tedious manual testing we'd have to do otherwise. Okay, so our app's done, and Agent has tested all the functionality, but now we have to test it out and make sure that it works so it looks pretty similar to what we had in our plan. I'm gonna type in my name. I'm gonna type in my email, [email protected]. Nice little touch there, when I hit enter to move to the next page, I can hit tab to jump into the text window, which is exactly what I wanted on this contact form. So I'll say 'my new submission'. And now we get actually a multi-line text box so we can submit, multiple lines on the last page and then hit control, enter to submit. So that's a pretty nice user experience. I actually like that flow quite a bit. What else do we have to check? Well, we specified that we wanted to store this in a database, so now we need to check that and make sure the database is actually working. So what I'm gonna do is go to the database pane if you haven't used the database before, database is just a structured way of storing data, works really well with structured data or semi-structured data. We'll talk about that more in the course and on Replit, you get a development database and a production database. So when you deploy your app, we'll give you a separate database so you don't have to worry about messing up data that's living live on your app. But we're gonna go into our development database and we're gonna see, there's a form submission here. There are actually two rows, it looks like Agent submitted an example row for us, and then we have my submission. So it looks like our app is really doing kind of everything we wanted here. This is kind of nice. Maybe it could be a bit more minimalist, but this is really exactly what I wanted and I'm gonna go through it one more time. It looks like the animations are a little jittery as we're moving through this app. So small knit, our follow up prompt is going to be, ‘The animations are a bit jittery on form submission. The form appears to “jump” as it loads. Can you make the page a bit', or rather, 'Can you make the animations a bit more smooth and check the app for proper use of transitions.’ Again, we're being very descriptive, we're really digging into how those animations work. And inherently, if you think about it, animations are a really hard thing to test. It's really hard for me to visually inspect an app, especially if I'm AI to visually inspect an app and check that, make sure we got it right. So that's a tricky piece, we're gonna see what Agent gets and see how it fixes our app. Alright, so we have our fixed animations. Let's try it out again. We'll type in, Matt, hit enter. Now we get a bit of a longer transition. It's actually much smoother, so that's better. I think we're maybe one prompt away here. ‘The transition is a bit too long’. We'll say ‘The jitter is gone, but we need to shorten and simplify the transitions’. So a couple follow up prompts. I'm pretty confident that this one's gonna give us what we want. We have our form that's writing to our database. We're gonna wrap up the work in Replit for this lesson, and we're gonna move on to what's next. And so now let's recap what we just built as well as some of the themes that we've been seeing. So first there are multiple solutions and the app that you built probably looks different from the app that I built. And there's really no right answer to how we prompt, and that's kind of what makes AI special. But it also means that AI might surprise us and we should expect to be surprised on the upside and the downside. But as the manager, we're going to have to act to course correct AI and get we what we want out of these systems. And because of that, we need to focus on solutions rather than specific implementation details. So foundations are important. And when I say foundations, I mean how our app works, how our app looks, whether it stores data in a database or uses some other method, whether we need to store data in the first place. These are all crucial to the application that we're building. So the things we have to ask ourselves at the end of the day, does it fulfill our user stories?Is the core functionality working? Can we build on this foundation? So perfect is the enemy of the good, but starting over is okay. And so if you tried this lesson and you didn't get something that worked, I'd recommend giving it another shot. Or if you're open to exploring, give some new prompts a try. Now we'll go on to the next lesson.2. Let's practice!
Create Your Free Account
or
By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.