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Comment by tymscar | Hacker News Reader

The ai part of the app is basically useless. After 2 hours of “vibe coding” a chess clock flutter app I got basically nothing in the end.

It broke more and more each message. I tried fixing stuff myself but it would mess it up again. Would not recommend anyone to use it.

Now for the non ai part: super cool. I love the nix environment. Its fascinating how they handle the previews for example. I got geekbench up and running an the cpu is a bit worse than an iphone 15 pro max, but it has 32 gigs of ram!

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[ I work on Dart at Google. ]

The app prototyping logic in Firebase Studio isn't wired up for Flutter/Dart yet. You can play with Gemini+Dart/Flutter here: https://dartpad.dev/?channel=main.

We're working with the Firebase Studio team to integrate. FWIW, it seems to do fairly well with "Create a chess clock app".

Hey. That makes more sense. To be honest, I don’t think it should be one of the main things on the front page when creating a new project in that case. However for what it’s worth Ive also asked gemini to translate this simple chess clock app to react because of how buggy the flutter project was and it just got stuck again and again no matter how much I helped it

[Full disclosure, work @ Firebase]

But try this:

Open up a blank Flutter template in Studio: https://studio.firebase.google.com/new/flutter

After everything initializes and your Android and web previews set up, open chat by clicking the little Gemini spark at the bottom of the workspace and then add your prompt.

YMMV, but I got a very basic, but working chess clock in one shot with "Can you replace this sample Flutter project with a fully-functional chess clock that works on Android and on the web?"

That's how I've done it when it did not work. I did, however, go easier, one by one. I first made a simple countdown. Then I made it count down from 10 minutes to 0. Then I created 2 of them. Then I put them side by side. Then I did the logic, one counterstarting each other. Every step of the way, it was filled with loads of errors and loops out of which the ai couldnt get out, to the point where I would need to go there and fix it myself. Errors ranged from logical, to super simple syntax issues, such as missing colons, or brackets.

I have tried again step by step with what you said here, copy pasted the prompt even and after a couple changes here and there it loses the plot and gets stuck and seemingly no amount of prompting can get it out.

To make sure I tried 3 times in a row. Same result.

I feel like in the emperors new clothes story.

Well, not conpletely Emperor’s New Clothes: after I got my basic chess clock, I asked for skeuomorphic changes…I got a fantastic “next steps” summary in return…but when I said “Go on ahead, your choice,” it created an incompatible dependency nest trying to add clicky sounds.

Gemini actually dug me out of it, though, with additional prompting (this kind of surprised me; I assumed I’d have to eventually really step in). After all that distraction, though, I had to reset the convo to get it to focus on the files again.

Totally understand that you might be too annoyed at this point, but if you do have a few minutes, it’d be amazing to file a case @ https://firebase.google.com/support/troubleshooter/studio for the team to dig into.

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