Using AI to code and ship a paid product in under 10 hours

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2025-01-09 14:00:07

The progress made on AI coding tools has been absolutely wild. I’m not a developer – I can get around a bit in HTML and CSS but definitely couldn’t reasonably market my skills as a front end engineer. However, like many product and design folks, I’ve had many ideas I wanted to try over the years – but without these development skills, I’ve had no ability to make them happen. So after seeing the promise of these AI coding tools, I thought I’d test them out to see how far they could take me.

The idea: back when I was consulting I was always annoyed that W9s were a pain to send and track, and I wanted a tool to quickly generate and send them. Not a huge pain point admittedly, more like one of those annoyances I always wanted to fix. I had briefly stood up a tool like this with an engineer friend, but he ultimately lost interest and we ended up shutting it down. So I wanted to find out – with the assistance of AI, could I recreate this tool on my own?

First, I created a quick mockup in Figma. I didn’t spend a lot of time here getting to high fidelity, just enough to shape the app. I could have probably gotten away without this, as the final version deviated quite a bit from the original designs. If you are not a designer, you can get away with very rough wireframes here that outline the basic content and interactions.