I previously let an AI agent build an entire social media site in one day. It worked, but then it introduced a bug that neither I nor the agent could fix because I had no idea what the code did.
Now I want to rebuild it. I want to use AI again, but this time as an assistant – I’ll review every change, write tests together, and keep a clear plan.
Which AI tool would you recommend for this hybrid approach? How do you structure prompts to force the agent to explain before coding?
Also, do you think a couple of weeks is realistic to rebuild the site that has feature parity with Lemmy and a few extra features that the AI managed to build in a single day? Should I switch to a more manual approach with the agent only for boilerplate?
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!
If you have the knowledge and understanding to build such a system from the ground up, and you can translate that knowledge into a set of very detailed instructions, you might be successful in this. If you can’t, you will not.
The fact that you couldn’t fix a bug it introduced by just rolling back to an earlier commit and trying something different tells me a lot. You likely don’t have the domain knowledge to build a social media site (no worries, me either). Have you moderated / admined social media before?
What’s your database going to be? What’s the schema? Why? What endpoints will you need? What is the API contract? What is your versioning scheme for your API contract? What admin tools do you intend to create? How are they secured? How do you store passwords? How does a user reset their own password? How do you prevent hacking attempts?& How do you handle media? How do you handle gdpr requests? How will you handle blocking? How will you prevent CSAM? How will you handle DDOS attacks?
If you haven’t thought about every single one of those questions and more, you’re not ready to build this. Good luck, mate.