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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

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Founder of Phind here. Hearing something like this really touches me and the team and this is exactly why we do what we do.

The Pair Programmer feature is absolutely fantastic and a massive gamechanger. It helped me figure out the architecture for a new app I'm planning. I showed it to a senior developer in my coworking space and he said - in his own words - "yep, that's how I would approach it too".

Wow, that's amazing! We'd love to talk to you about your experience and hear your feedback -- my email is michael@phind.com.

How on earth are you affording the OpenAI API fees?

Starts with V and rhymes with sea.

Would you mind sharing the app link? Curious to see what you made with the help of AI.

Unfortunately that would mean doxxing myself. But its largely a somewhat complex CRUD app with a user dashboard. The stac is nextjs, tailwind, and nodejs, express on the backend.

Did you use templates for the dashboard or just GPT, any complex prompting resources?

I built most off my UI off of FlowBite (which is a tailwind UI library). Did not need to use complex prompting resources, though I would sometimes switch between Phind and chatGPT-4 to get a better answer.

I think it works because its not a very complex app and since it's gated with a sufficiently high entry, I don't expect a ton of traffic, hence scaling is not an issue. I also chose the easiest options to deploy (Vercel for the frontned, Heroku for the backend), which might end up costing me in the long run - but I figure I'll get that fixed later

noob with 8 months of coding knowledge? That's why you have posts like:

My year in tech regrets ([insertyouwebsitehere].com) 7 points by spaceman_2020 on Jan 15, 2014 | past | 3 comments

You can be in tech without knowing how to code, you know :)

Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.

I've tried phind and it's almost always worse than a Google search. It often has a reasonable answer, but with Google I typically find more complete information and sometimes better rebuttals and alternatives.

I view the thing as a neat toy. Can you learn from it? Maybe. But if you think this allows you to learn something you couldn't otherwise, I wonder if you're really being honest with yourself.

I reckon the kind of questions I’m asking are way more basic than an experienced developer would. GPT-4 is likely way better at answering simpler questions since there is usually far more tutorial content geared towards noobs online than.

I have no delusions that this is making me a good coder, or that I can carry this beyond the prototype stage - I fully intend to find a CTO/co-founder. But for someone going from 0 to 1, this has been a fantastic tool.

Please write a blog post about your journey!

may i ask how you got paying users?

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