From text to web app: My first adventure with Replit AI

I built a whimsical countdown app in under an hour (and I'm hooked)

Hey hey hey! I’m pumped right now.

I’ve been playing around with diverse AI tools for the past years, but last night for the first time, I went from text to a real web app, and it was such a fun and easy experience that I feel compelled to come and shout it to the world.

Two days ago, I came across this Instagram account of a young designer and developer who creates cute web apps for the most whimsical things. For example, she has a video where she explains that her crush overcooked his eggs, so she immediately rushed to build a website with different timers based on egg types. I found it so adorable, I wished she had a crush on me too.

Fast forward to last night, while chatting with a friend traveling around the world, I decided to create a simple web app to count the days until their return home.

From the idea to the first version of the website, it took me less than an hour.

I first started by doing the design of the website. I knew that I needed a countdown, so I went on dribble to find inspiration of nice countdown. I found one simple and clean enough, so I took a screenshot of it.

I opened my dusty figma account, and with a mix of copy/paste, I had an visual idea of what I wanted to build.

With my design ready, I asked Claude to help me write a prompt for Replit AI to create this screen, minus the signup button and with different text. Claude, being helpful as always, happily assisted, and I got my prompt.

That was almost it.

The first version worked well but had a few missing elements, like the divider above the dropdown and the headline being at the top of the counter instead of the bottom. After several back-and-forth adjustments that took about 10 minutes, I had a webpage that closely matched my screenshot. From initial idea to this result took roughly 1 hour.

However, I spent nearly 2 more hours completing the project for one simple reason: I wanted the emoji to float smoothly from bottom to top in the background. Getting Replit and I to understand each other on this took quite a while.

I tried recording how the page looked and uploading it to Claude to help me explain to Replit that this wasn’t what we wanted (spoiler alert: you can’t upload videos or GIFs in Claude) (spoiler alert #2: yes, I love using one LLM to help me talk to another LLM, it’s a nice trick). I tried explaining it to Replit several times in different ways, but we weren’t achieving the desired result. And this is at this exact moment that the most interesting part of this process happened.

After multiple tries, I stopped attempting to improve my prompt because I honestly didn’t know how to better explain what I wanted. Instead, I simply started telling Replit that what it did wasn’t right. After each iteration, Replit asks if the result matches what you want, so I started saying no (see picture below). It turns out that if you say no multiple times, this smart system will “think deeply” and try different programming approaches. After 3 to 5 nos, Replit managed to fix the issue on its own.

I got the animation I wanted, and the cute and totally silly website for my friend!

Here is an adapted version of my web app that I enjoyed creating to illustrate this post: beyonce-concert-countdown.replit.app.

I'll probably share it later today with my friend Shanell, who I'm going to see Beyoncé with this summer. This means I've now created two whimsical web apps in less than 24 hours. This makes me happy.

But beyond the cute countdown timers and floating emojis, this experience showed me something profound about the evolving relationship between creativity and technology. In just a few hours, I went from an idea to a functional web app without writing a single line of code myself. This experience was 100x better than with any no-code tools I used in the past. And the most fascinating part wasn't just the end result, but how the AI adapted and was a true work partner in the process, making creative suggestion and thinking on it own about different alternative.

This marks the beginning of my journey creating whimsical web apps that might not change the world, but certainly bring moments of joy to the people I care about. Sometimes the most meaningful technology isn't about solving grand challenges, but creating small moments of connection.

So here's to many more silly, totally useless, but utterly delightful, websites in my future. The barrier between imagination and creation has never been thinner, and I can't wait to see what I'll build next.

Until then, I'll be watching those emojis float seamlessly from bottom to top, counting down the days until my next app.

Delightfully yours,

Ki