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Show HN: Use GPT4 to quickly build simple, shareable web apps (picoapps.xyz)

10 points by abi ↗ HN
Hi everyone,

I built a quick experiment last weekend that allows you to use GPT4 to quickly generate single page web apps. These apps are immediately deployed at a shareable and bookmark-able web URL.

Even though I’m a programmer, I think the idea of letting users build little apps without coding to solve their own problems is super exciting. I specifically built this because I wanted to solve a tiny problem of mine. I have a goal of running 500 miles this year. I track my runs on Strava and it shows me the total number of miles for the year. But I wanted to know: how many miles should I have run by this point in the year to be on track? I prompted and iterated with Pico and a few mins, I had a simple app: [https://backend-pico.onrender.com/gender-hybrid](https://bac... that I could add to my iPhone home screen.

The apps built by Pico have lots of limitations (single page, can only use HTML/CSS/vanilla JS + popular JS libraries) but they can also be incredibly powerful and surprisingly useful sometimes. And sometimes, Pico will completely fail to generate anything useful :(

Here are some fun things you can build:

* Wordle, Tic Tac Toe, any simple game.

* TODO list.

* Daily affirmations/horoscope.

* Camera filter app

* Audio recorder and processor

* “App for lumberjacks”

See website for demo apps.

I would love to hear your feedback and see what you build with Pico.

6 comments

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durkes
This is really cool. I had a lot of fun building a hangman style game just now! It took 3 prompts to get it right... here was my third iteration (sorry, didn't save the first two): There is a problem where player 1 is unable to enter the secret word at the very beginning. Fix this issue. Also, clear the letter from the input after each time player 2 makes a guess, but display the incorrect guesses somewhere and don't allow player 2 to guess the same letter more than once.

I think it got a little confused with my last prompt: "Make both players also able to submit the input with the enter key." It correctly added the functionality, but it left it's explanation in the HTML of the page too. Still very cool. Here is the working game: https://backend-pico.onrender.com/hyundai-interface

abi
Thanks for sharing! Glad you had fun.

GPT4 sometimes insists on adding commentary even though I told it to only reply with code. I need to add a regex to clean up the response and only put the code into the page. I fixed your code manually to remove the explanation.

durkes
I wonder if you remind it with those instructions with each prompt, if that would help? Also, I'm curious, approx how much does it cost for each small app build / iteration?
abi
Been using system message with GPT4 and it's supposed to follow that better, but that's a good idea. Will experiment with that.

Cost is somewhere between 1 cent to 10 cents per iteration (follow up iterations include all previous code so it's a lot of tokens).

SoldierSurfer
Dude, this is way gnarly. I am a senior citizen (aged 29+++) who prefers large fonts, so I created 2 simple web apps, using your excellent program -

1) simple word processor with 30 pt font size and brown text color https://backend-pico.onrender.com/bicycle-bah 2) bit larger font and blue in color https://backend-pico.onrender.com/chrysler-randomisation

Thank you much, good sir. I hope you keep the links up, because I intend to use them.

GPT4 and all these new AI stuff impress the heck out of this old dude every day.

abi
Glad it was helpful for you. Yeah, I do intend to keep it up at least for a while :)