Fun with AI Experiments in development as a UX Designer

A few weeks ago I read a post about Bolt.new. “Prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web apps.”… it states. Wow, yes I feel so empowered! Finally there’s an outlet for all my ideas… watch out! I am hooked!

Disclaimer: Now, I want to make sure you know I do not waltz over the expertise knowledge of any developer I’ve ever worked with or might in the future. Dev’s, I love you! When I experiment with AI and UX Design I am very underwhelmed and I’m sure developers have the same with development AI’s. Due to my lack of in depth knowledge, I know I can’t judge the build quality and it might be laughable. That said though…

My first AI experiment

First thing I did, was ask Bolt.new to build me a crypto calculator, just to see how far I could go. BTC was rising to a new ATH at that time, so it was a topic that was on my mind.

My prompt:
Create a personal application, with at least 2 pages to run on a mac, possibly store data locally but in a hashed and secure matter because it contains financial information.

- calculator
- portfolio

For the calculator:
Create a crypto currency stop/loss calculator to generate strategies with AI for feedback on the chosen strategies. Add tooltips to all fields for educational purposes to explain the fields. Add the ability to edit and save strategies for later, add the ability to comment on strategies.

For the portfolio
Create a crypto portfolio to add currencies and all the transactions to record. Calculate a running total profil/loss for all currencies and the total. Add a live tracking to actual price and provide live feedback on the portfolio. Add the ability to export to csv.

And within minutes I had exactly what I asked for, though slightly unsophisticated. I continued with a series of “add this” and “remove that”, using this AI tool as a… tool… yes I did the tool thing. But it was addictive, just spilling my thoughts, iterating until a slightly acceptable first version came out. Have a look yourself (fake data of course).

Moreish…

After this I went on to build a budget management tool for a friend. Adding authentication, doing a deploy and build a repository. My prompting was still a bit infantile and it showed in the number of corrections I had to ask it to make.

But in all fairness, I didn’t expect to tell it to maintain the version number with each improvement, after I asked it to add the version number. In hindsight, showing the number and having it add up are two separate requests, I can see that now (though, if Bolt was that smart… well I expected more).

More AI experiments to come

If you know me at all, you might guess that my interest was thoroughly piqued by now. I’ve found a new challenge, and want to improve my prompting skills and the ability to steer the visual design more. So far Bolt has been mouthy, telling me he just uses Tailwind defaults and changing that would be time consuming. I’ve heard that excuse before!

Stay tuned! While I perfect my prompting skills and study a bit with IBM’s AI courses, I will document some more steps and learnings along the way. This will be good!