Show HN: Todo Screenshots; take screenshot to add a todo

Many times, i make commitments to people - like, i will get back or i will follow up. But then that just gets lost in all the noise. I forget where i made those commitments.

So, i built this simple tool where each time i make such a commitment, i can just take a screenshot and share it with this app. the app will create a todo which i can mark as done later.

super simple app. do give it a swing :)

the other thing i wanted to share is that i thought this was a trivial enough app for chat gpt to make. And that's why i signed up to build this at 1am. i thought i'll be in and out quickly. I got chat gpt to write the entire code.

But ...

It didn't work. I spent hours debugging. and the errors were so small that i didn't spot it at all!

particularly this one : I needed other apps to be able to share an image with this app. On the android manifest, i needed to set a configuration called "android.intent.action.SEND"

but chat gpt gave me the code which had "android.intent.android.intent.action.SEND"

I didn't spot it at all and went down several rabbitholes to figure out why the configuration isn't being set. I thought it was a compiler issue so i did several rounds of clean builds and decompiled the build to check the configurations.

It was a nightmare.

I gave up and went to sleep.

Today morning, i rewrote the app from scratch. It took me 30 minutes. I still used chat gpt, but only for very specific mundane/boilerplate code. Everything else i wrote myself.

I find these AI tools to be incredibly useful to code, but i they are not able to build e2e systems. Even if they build something that's 80% there and i have to write only the 20% that'd be great. but i fear that's not where the state of the art is. It significantly sets you behind if you get it to write large chunks of code.