Building an app with ChatGPT, from zero to one, as a Product Manager

So, 3-4 week ago I decided to run an experiment - can I, as a product manager, who hasn't actively written code for a long time, design, build, and deploy an app using ChatGPT, within a reasonable amount of time? The reason I was curious about that is to see whether it's possible that there will be a big shift to product managers and business analysts doing more in terms of prototyping and even launching small products/features without involving engineering.

I spent about 3 weeks on it working nights and a few weekends, maybe a total of 60-70 hrs (I decided not to stop at a crude prototype, but actually implement edge cases, error handling, security, etc).?I had a ChatGPT+ account, so that gave me better stability when accessing the bot and access to GPT4.

While I have a decent foundation, having done my BS in CS and being around various aspects of technology (system design, UX, SW development, devops, hosting) but I haven't done hands on development for the past 10+ years.

Here were my findings through this process:

ChatGPT helped me pick the right tools for the job (Vue.js framework for the single-page app) and to crank out the code in iterations.?I definitely couldn't have done it without it.?With that said, there were definitely some idiosyncrasies:

• The limits that ChatGPT UI imposes (4k tokens on input and output and around what looks to be 15k of context) are quite restrictive and you end up doing a lot of segmentation in your questions.?This is less than ideal and takes extra effort.?I had not tried accessing via CLI - just read somewhere that it doesn't impose the same limits - will be checking it out.
• The quality of the "making sense of the code" has been inconsistent - sometimes it does better, and sometimes it does worse.?I'm not sure what it has to do with.?With that, my advice would be start structuring the code early (breaking code into smaller functions) as ChatGPT isn't going to automatically do it for you, but it will if you ask it.?Makes troubleshooting easier down the road.
• GPT4 cuts out after 25 queries over 3 hours and switches you to the "default" model, which I presume is 3.5 - interestingly it picks up pretty well and I almost want to say it does better than GPT4, but because I didn't start out with 3.5, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

I used Replit for the new-age IDE.?It's a good concept and probably is the future, especially if they can combine it with a meaningful Codex/ChatGPT integration.?The AI that they currently have is not all that useful as it doesn't utilize the code from the project and requires all the same manipulations and back and forth that I was doing with ChatGPT.??I really liked how Replit is integrating with the Github for source control however, and how it takes care of the staging.

I deployed with Cloudflare as I wanted to deploy as cloud native.?I used CF pages for the UI and a worker for the backend (API gateway).?I liked how the pages were integrating with Github for CICD - basically the app would redeploy itself on any commit to the main branch.?I also liked that CF makes network and security setup a breeze.

So, without further ado, here's what I came up with:

Overall, not only was I able to build (what I think is) a small useful app, but get spun up on the modern frameworks and get some hands on time, without drowning in syntax and framework learning, which is exactly what I wanted.?I think it's a huge deal and opens up the door to software development to a lot of people.