From No Dev Environment to My First Flutter App in a Few Hours Using AI

I asked ChatGPT earlier this morning if it could write an Android app for me as if I knew nothing. It said "of course", but offered me alternatives:

• to do all the work itself and all I'd have to do is download a file and install the app
• to teach me how to do it

Hey, I like the mindset it is trained on, on this matter! Applying well the proverb: "give a man a fish you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.".

Guess what I chose? Well... the title may have give it away, but I actually wanted to go through the process and see how difficult it would be for someone as rusty as I am to do this.

So, on the way to build my Android app, the AI told me exactly what I need to install and troubleshoot one small error at some point, I created a virtual android device (I could choose the OS version I wanted/needed) on my laptop to test my apps, build and run a small demo app (which at first I screw up because I built the wrong kind of app, but it immediately figured out what I did from the error I received, and then start building the actual app).

I just noticed the background on the Android emulator is pink-ish, lol:

I'm not finished with this small app, it doesn't even matter what it does, but I can slowly build it, even if I have no knowledge of Flutter and won't pretend that now that I'm "building" it, I do. I'm mostly copy-pasting and reporting back the errors to ChatGPT.

The process seems to be working and so far I haven't run into any blockage.

It is of course an easy app, and I already know they are capable of creating from scratch to fully-working code things more complex than that.

Not all code is perfect, but if do a ping-pong with the AI it will very soon fix it. At least it did where I got errors or even warnings, also giving me the context to understand why the errors happened.

Where I believe such an endeavor might have its limitations is on medium/long term focusing on a task. I used ChatGPT without saving the conversation (theoretically, I don't believe it for a second they don't use these conversations), so it would be pretty difficult to pick up where we left off the next day or a week from now. But I know this is an issue even if you allow the AI to keep records. It "forgets" context after a while, which humans don't do.

I don't have more time today to play with it since we have to go to a celebration, but I'll do my best to see if I can complete the app and see what kind of context I'll need to provide to the app tomorrow or whenever I'll get back to it.