From Concept to Deployed App in 20 Minutes—From Bed!
Building an App to Track Rudy Giuliani’s Assets using ChatGPT and Bolt.new
So this morning—yes, this very Saturday morning—I’m lying in bed, groggy, just scrolling through the latest headlines, and I see this wild article about Rudy Giuliani turning over his watches and even a vintage Mercedes to settle his legal bills after a $148 million defamation case. You know, just a casual start to the day. But then, a thought hits me. “What would a product designer like me make of this Giuliani asset drama as a design problem?”
8:15 am
So, I popped over to ChatGPT and threw in a prompt: “How would a UX designer approach the sort of problem envisioned for Giuliani in this article?” And boom. ChatGPT hands me a brilliant take — we’re talking a whole UX concept from scratch. You can see exactly what it came up with at the end of this article (and I swear, it is exactly what I saw on my screen).1
Here is the basic idea it came up with: Asset Annie, a quirky, gamified web app designed to track and celebrate the liquidation of assets in high-stakes legal settlements. Built on a lightweight, responsive tech stack—React for interactivity, Framer Motion for smooth animations, and Firebase for real-time data tracking—Asset Annie offers two primary user experiences. For Rudy (the “anti-user”), the app gently nudges him through his gradual asset turnover with reflective prompts and progress indicators, encouraging a contemplative look at each item before it transfers ownership. Meanwhile, Ruby and Shaye, the beneficiaries, experience Asset Annie as a “cabinet of curiosities,” watching each item transition into their possession with celebratory animations and milestone rewards. They can even launch an auction of any item, instantly.
Mind-blowing, right? But, of course I wasn’t done. What if we could build this? Actually build it — and even deploy it online?
8:18 am
Next, I asked ChatGPT to go ahead and give me step-by-step instructions for building this thing out — you know, the whole shebang: designer, developer, product. And ChatGPT just delivered!
The next response was a detailed, unedited product spec, which you can see at the end of this article.2
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8:25 am
So, I just copied that response and pasted it into Bolt.new.
No edits, no revisions — just took it, slapped it right in. Bolt spit out the preview in seconds.
I added one final touch: a simple “auction” feature, just by typing in one line that asked for it. And then? I deployed it to the web.
8:40 am
A fully functional app, live on the internet, in twenty minutes. Check it out for yourself and prepare to be as blown away as I am.
So, yeah. It’s pretty insane. This means prototyping and testing are about to get real cheap, real fast. With this kind of speed, we’re looking at endless possibilities to test niche ideas, wild concepts, or totally speculative applications that normally we wouldn’t even consider because of cost and time.
Imagine being able to prototype whole products in under an hour. Ideas that we’ve avoided because they were too complex, too slow, too expensive, or “too risky” are suddenly accessible, testable, and deployable for a fraction of what it used to cost.
We’re in a new era in design, where failure’s no big deal because you can launch, test, iterate, and pivot before lunch. It’s going to change the way we think about design, and I, for one, am along for the ride.
Copyright ? 2024 by Paul Henry Smith ? Originally published on Substack