How I Accidentally Built an App!
lezzzzzzz goooooooooooo!
So I built an app last evening.
Which is wild because I literally had no idea what I was doing.
Welcome to HNDesignLab - my digital playground where I mess around with AI tools, throw adult learning principles at random problems, and let my curiosity run completely wild.
Last evening, I skipped my regular post-work routine and ended up falling down this rabbit hole of vibe coding - a term VERY new in my dictionary. I just wanted to play around with Lovable and see what all it can do. I also had a problem I wanted to solve. A couple hours later, I shut my laptop feeling that I might be on the path of building an automated solution.
A little backstory,
Every weekend, I sit and spend my time planning meals, figuring out grocery lists, and mapping out my weekly workouts. While it doesn’t take a lot of time to do this, it includes a lot of logistics - I look at my long-term fitness plan (Thanks, Claude AI), break it down for the week and write on my whiteboard, plan meals for the week, check groceries in the fridge and build a grocery list in the Alexa app (which I have been meaning to get rid of as we don’t use the device anymore). AI is here to make our life easier apparently and while I wait for the day it can fold my mountain of laundry or take out the trash for me, at least it can automate some things here.
That little thought turned into the most unexpected learning adventure I've had in a long while.
Now,
What I wanted: An app that could scan groceries for nutritional information, build a meal plan for the week from these ingredients, estimate calories and macros, create a workout tracker, and perhaps reward me for being a responsible adult.
What I knew: Literally nothing. Never touched GitHub, never coded, didn't even know CSS was a thing.
What I found: This platform called Lovable that basically lets you describe the kind of app you want and builds it for you.
So I just... started. Threw in a prompt describing my dream app and began refining it based on whatever I learned. No masterplan, no technical strategy - just pure "let's see what happens" energy.
An hour later, I felt:
Honestly, not knowing anything was kind of liberating.
When something broke, I just asked: Lovable suggested cloning to GitHub and I was like "what's GitHub?" but instead of panicking, I just learned. I messaged an engineer friend to show him what I built and he gave me some good feedback along with resources to fix.
Every technical hurdle became a mini-lesson: Installing Node.js, figuring out CSS, dealing with packages - all stuff I had to ChatGPT my way through.
I got ambitious with integrations: Added Apple Health connectivity even though APIs sounded scary.
Each iteration taught me something new: About user experience, about what I actually needed vs wanted, how should navigation look like and many other questions.
Another hour later, I realised:
I'm apparently REALLY good at problem-solving: Being completely clueless meant I didn't assume anything was impossible.
Iteration is everything: Every time I refined my prompt, both the app and my understanding got better.
Integration is magic: Getting Supabase integrated to enable data storage in a database rather than the local browser felt magical.
It was past dinnertime: I got so lost that I didn’t cook dinner and suddenly I could eat a horse (brain cells be sprinting, tummy be grumbling).
AI Tools I used:
Honestly, Lovable, Claude AI and ChatGPT made this possible. I felt like a person with a marker and a whiteboard in a room full of developers who built what I sketched. I could focus on the problem instead of learning syntax and that was empowering.
Wanna try Lovable? Use my referral link to sign up and we both will get extra 10 credits to play with the tool.
Sneak Peek into the progress so far:
What's Next?
Now, I have to ensure that the database in the backend has the right columns to store data, add a barcode scanner for nutritional information and somehow connect this to my Apple watch so workout data can be integrated seamlessly.
My big goal - Figure out how to turn this web app into an actual iPhone app, which is a whole new adventure since I have zero clue about App Store stuff or mobile development. But same energy - just gonna figure it out as I go. Ambitious, I know. Classic Heena behaviour 😝
Follow along as I build this?
P.S - If you're sitting there with some annoying problem thinking "someone should build something for this" - maybe just try building it yourself? The tools are there, you don't need a computer science degree, and honestly the worst that happens is you learn some new stuff.
Or reach out? I plan to do a lot of design experiments to chase the maddening rush I experienced last evening.
Anyone else building random stuff outside their wheelhouse? Would love to hear what experiments you're running.