Wins, Losses, & Learnings No-Coding My First Stand-Alone, Fully-Functioning (non-WordPress) AI App

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Quick No Code Win to report: I’ve been dabbling for over a year now, and I finally created my first fully-functioning no code app – A single instance Evite clone for an actual event I’m planning. Here is my tooling:

  • I created the initial design in Lovable, but I wasn’t satisfied with the result.
  • I ran the same prompt in v0 and got a much better result.
  • I moved to the coding phase in the Cursor IDE.
  • Using Netlify for hosting
  • Version control in Github.
  • Using Resend for email delivery
  • Using Supabase for the database.

I’m not looking to turn this into a SASS service or anything, but it was fun to know that I can invest 20 hours building an app to save me $50 worth of an Evite subscription! haha.

“I turned a million in real estate into $200 CASH!”

-Steve Martin

Experiences & Notes

  • My previous experience with AI has primarily been in building frontends to WordPress (e.g. “headless WP”) and custom WP plugins.
  • It was neat to be exposed to the world outside of WP for a bit. (Makes me both appreciate and loathe the stability and maturity that WP brings.)
  • It’s much more exciting & fun to cowboy code without a care in the world than to worry about “How secure is this thing I’m building for my client?” and “Have I covered enough use cases?”
  • I didn’t take any actions on turning this into a SASS product, and I have no idea (yet?) what’s required for that (I’m guessing it’s more than 20 hours, though .) Still, that’d be the next phase if I decided to continue down this road with this app.

WordPress vs Cursor vs Claude vs ChatGPT vs Lovable

  • Every WordPress install comes with all the core services PRE-INSTALLED! For example, out of the box, WP does security, users, logins, users, email, database, etc. 
  • It’s strange to me that popular AI tools don’t integrate AT ALL with standalone WP, which is BY FAR the most-used website builder in the world. (As of this writing, WP commands a 40% cms market share – it’s nearest competitor, Wix, commands only a 9% market share.)
  • With WordPress I know my app is secure (so long as I plug into WP core functions and use basic best-practices). I have NO IDEA if this AI app I built is secure (it’s probably not).
  • If an AI engine was built to integrate with WP and used WP best-practices, it would be unstoppable. I mean, almost EVERY SINGLE HOST ALREADY SUPPORTS WORDPRESS out of the box (there’d be no need to create SASS accounts for Supabase, Mailgun, etc. There’s no reason why not to start with WP, except, perhaps, PROFIT MOTIVE (these AI services are ALL getting into the website hosting game – that’s WP’s turf, folks!).
  • Portability is a core value of WP, not so much with these AI apps (As of this writing, Lovable Cloud doesn’t even support a basic “export” feature for its cloud database).

AI Prompt Learnings

I learned quite a bit about prompting AI and other things in the process. Some of my learnings and observations include:

  • AI tooling has improved greatly over the last year. I couldn’t have done this so quickly (or at all?) 2 years ago.
  • You’ve gotta continue to watch the files that are being changed by AI. Github was my constant companion in this to ensure AI didn’t rewrite unrelated working features when I was asking it to fix code or even do something simple like “change this to red”.
  • Cursor is great.
  • I tried Lovable, but quickly used my free credits. Rather than pay them for more credits, I moved to v0 and then to Cursor’s IDE.
  • Even though I had never used Cursor before, it was very much inline with my comfort zone (I previously used Visual Studio for AI-related coding).
  • .env files are a new concept to me (they don’t exist in standard WP installs), and I’m starting to understand how to use them.
  • I’m experienced enough to believe this app has security vulnerabilities aplenty (possibly related to the .env file). If this were a high-value app, I would CERTAINLY pay a security expert to review the code.
  • It’s fun fun fun to tell a computer to do something and then have it do the thing! It’s very frustrating when you tell a computer to do something, and it completely biffs. Both scenarios were prevalent in my time building this app.
  • This Evite clone app seems rather simple, but I still had to send many prompts to AI to get my app to do basic things that Evite does by default. The fact that AI doesn’t really understand what Evite does is kind of alarming…

The App Works! (and works well!)

Here’s the frontend view of my new “no code” AI app:

Frontend view of my Evite clone

Here’s the admin view:

It sends me an email every time someone registers, and it also sends the registrant an email confirmation.

In many ways, it’s BETTER than Evite (I have full control over everything), and in many ways it’s not as good (it lacks a “reminder” feature…but perhaps I can add that before the event…).

Total out-of-pocket cost: $20 (for Cursor credits).

Connect With Me

I’m curious: What are your personal experiences/pros/cons building with AI?

Oh! And if you’d like to RSVP to our CAKE dadband extravaganza event (and check out the app in the process) – 👉 go for it!

(Fwiw, No AI was used in the writing of this article.)