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I'm sure you've heard of AI, and its sidekick: vibe coding. Yeah, it's a thing right now. The question is: Are you using it to create solutions to real-world problems and get paid for the value you provide? This is the story of how I leveraged the power of Grok AI and vibe coded my dream app: a PC Builder tool.
Back in October 2021, I needed to build a tool that helps ordinary people build a PC without thinking of the technicalities involved. I had a blog I started in 2018, built around the PC hardware niche, and the traffic was failing (thanks to Google's incessant updates).
I didn't know how to code, despite having a background in graphic design/front-end web development, with some knowledge of HTML and CSS. JavaScript and PHP were "too complicated" for my brain to handle. If I had coding skills, I could have written the code for the plugin for my blog.
I needed to do something fast, so I began to look for someone to write the code for the plugin. I went online and found a company in India, and their quote ran into thousands of dollars. I was determined to build that plugin because of its potential; I wanted to compete with sites like PC Part Picker.
We signed the agreement, and they went to work. Three months later, done. I had managed to pay about $1200 initial deposit. By the time they were done, I couldn't finish paying the balance of about $1K (the site wasn't earning money anymore because the Helpful Content Update destroyed its traffic).
To date, I haven't fulfilled my balance of payment. I planned to deploy the tool, hoping that traffic would improve (Google loves such tools). Faced with disappointment, I secretly nursed the dream of building the tool. I believed that a day would come when I'd build this tool, but I didn't know how until AI happened.
Grok AI to the Rescue
Initially, I tried using Chat GPT and Claude AI to build this tool, but Chat GPT was not giving me good results (maybe because I was on the free plan). I switched to Claude AI, and it gave me better results. However, my vibe coding efforts once again hit the brick wall: my chat got too long for my free plan.
I ditched it for Grok AI because the opportunity came unexpectedly.
Early in March, Elon opened the doors to Grok AI with a single post on X: "Grok AI is free for everyone until our servers melt". Excitedly, I stepped up to the opportunity.
I fed Grok AI my prompt (a massive 2-page Word document!) and in a matter of seconds, I had a working version of the plugin! In a few days, the plugin was ready, complete with all the functionalities that I wanted, and more.
I was blown away by how fast and precisely the AI churned out code; it was like a developer on steroids!. The code was ready in just a matter of hours, but a lot still had to be done: the backend required tediously long hours of data entry, which involved saving thousands of PC components to the database. That didn't deter me because the effort was worth it, by the way.
Today, the PC Builder tool is live. My dream had finally come true, thanks to AI!
You can build anything with AI nowadays. You don't even need to know how to write code. Anyone can do it! Here are some of the lessons I learned from my experience with Grok AI.
Find A Niche
Think of a real-world problem to create a solution for:
* Solving a problem you had (other people must have had the same problem)
* Building websites for clients
* Creating plugins for WordPress or any other platform
* Building web apps to do anything
You can use AI to research these and more simply by typing into ChatGPT: Give me ideas for [platform - Android, Windows, iOS] apps with unique features that I can create right now. This app is for so-so and so age groups and people in so-and-so locations.
Start Building
There's an abundance of vibe-coding platforms powered by AI right now. Think of tools like Cursor AI, Windsurf, GitHub CoPilot, and others. I used the free version of Grok AI, but you can get even more from the paid version. Grok AI is open to everyone (free and paid users), though if you're on free, you're limited to a few prompts a day to reset the next day.
Master Prompting and Context
Write prompts effectively (I can't emphasize this enough). Don't give it half information, or it will give you half-baked output. This is why prompt engineering is a thing nowadays. And oh, don't forget... context.
Context is simply telling the AI everything it needs to know about what you intend to achieve. In my case, I simply update the new chat with how far I've come with the development.
Give the AI tool all the information it needs to give you the best results. If you're building something as complicated as the plugin that I built, expect the memory required to hold your conversation to shoot up exponentially as you continue to prompt it. At a point, the tab I was working in was consuming about 3GB of RAM... I had to open a new chat and give it context, and voila, it continued building the tool.
AI Doesn't Get Tired (But Human Devs Do)
This is the most profound aspect of my experience. With a human dev, you're faced with issues like timeframes and lag (which is to be expected; they are human after all). Not so with Grok AI. I can wake up at 2 am, and it's there waiting for me by asking me the familiar question, "How can Grok help today?"
You can get huge coding tasks churned out in minutes, compared to a human coder who requires weeks to complete a similar task.
Keep Ideating
Also, ask the AI to come up with ideas on how to implement a feature you want. You'd be surprised that your idea on how to implement that feature isn't as good as you thought!
Watch Out for Memory Issues
I often had to move the chat to a new one due to memory issues. This happened four times. But I'm glad it did the job, despite my 8GB RAM laptop.
Expect AI to Slip Up (Occasionally)
Another thing: if you need it to create a functionality, include the code it has generated earlier. This way, the AI will not slip up (it does that sometimes, tending to forget exactly what it output earlier). Write the prompt in this format:
If you stick to this routine (always enable THINK), the output will be exactly what you envisioned. Trust me, this thing is a beast. It reads and writes code faster than any human ever will. It'll blow your mind if you know how to prompt it.
When I noticed that Grok often broke existing functionalities while implementing new ones, I switched from asking it to output full code to just the updated code snippets. This way, it focused on only areas that needed updating, minimizing the incidence of messing up existing functionalities.
Wrap Up
Well, that's my story. AI is the future of coding. It helped me fulfill my dream, and it can for you too. If this story inspired you, let me know the ideas swimming around in your brain right now in the comments below. You can test run the tool here.
What do you want to build with AI?
