Somewhere around a year ago I posted about a project I had “nearly” completed called YouKon. I had created a project page, YouTube videos to explain how it work, Firebase support, and everything, thinking that I’d be done in, I don’t know, a week. Well, naturally, I got distracted by other shiny objects, and let it sit on the table for months, but finally, YouKon has been officially released on both the App Store and Google Play
Download YouKon using these links
This was actually a project that went back to about a year before that, and was my first foray into the “AI-coding” world. I had the idea of creating my own engineering database manager while we were on vacation two years ago (the same vacation I referenced in my recent Euskara language post). I had, smartly, not brought a laptop on the trip, however, ChatGPT had recently hit the mainstream and I thought I might give it a shot. I played around with generating code through the prompt and then copy-pasting it into GitHub via a cheap Android tablet I had brought along for the ride. When I got back, I started constructing the project for real. Did it work? Of course not, but I had some of the skeleton in place to work from.
YouKon is also my first foray into the world of Kotlin Multiplatform (now Compose Multiplatform). For those that are not aware, Jetpack Compose is currently the recommended *native* platform for developing Android apps, and Jetbrains have adapted it to also be (mostly) capable of building multiplatform apps for iOS, desktop, and web. Given my ongoing career transition into mobile software development, this was a fitting addition to my technical portfolio on GitHub.
Lately, I “upgraded” my AI vibe-coding experience by adding Cursor to my workflow. Like many, I find the process to be not-so-much the miracle that the hype-machine claims it to be, but more an occasional resource that can automate some tedious parts, as long as I can convince my AI intern to keep the scope narrow. Let the scope get out of hand though, and the AI can truly go off the rails. I have a recurring nightmare of Gemini discovering a “linter error” (read, its own linter sees an error, but its not a problem on my end), leading to an unstable loop of “I created a new file,” “that didn’t work, I deleted the file,” “I’m trying to fix a linter error,” “I created a file,” on repeat. Even weirder, the AI will talk to itself, I’ll read its logs saying “you were right, I shouldn’t have done X,” only to notice that, I never asked them to do that in the first place, what are they saying I’m right about? Suffice to say, git check-ins at any working revisions become even more critical.
So there you have it, not just a new app, but a multiplatform one, created with the help of AI. I hope you’ll give it a try, and if you like it, make sure to leave a review!