A computer-science grad with no iOS experience builds a timezone-converter app in a few days using Cursor and GPT, starting from a three-hour Swift tutorial. The app lets you pick time zones, set a meeting time, and share the result. He's asking whether to actually launch it.
Build an app with me with AI while flying to New York. Let me be honest, I've never built an iOS app before despite majoring in CS. So the first thing I did was watching this 3-hour-long YouTube tutorial on the basics of Xcode and Swift, because even with AI, I do need to have an idea of what's going on. So what am I building? The app is essentially a timezone converter to simplify meeting scheduling and outputs a shareable message. The inspiration was from my own struggle when I was in China trying to plan meetings with teammates across 3, 4 different time zones. But when I started the project, I quickly realized it was way more complicated than the tutorial. So I waited until I had internet after my layover in Seoul to prompt GPT for some help. The code had some errors, and before I could debug, I lost internet. So I took a nap and really locked in during my 6-hour layover in Hawaii. This time, I switched to Cursor, which if you don't know, is a very powerful AI code editor. I used their Composer feature, which not only generates code but allows simultaneous multi-file editing. It basically wrote the whole app. With only a few rounds of debugging, the app was up and running. You can select your time zone, your teammate's time zone, and a future meeting time. It then generates a message you can share instantly. I added some UI adjustments and generated a logo with Midjourney. Before I even boarded my last flight, I had a functional app. It was insane. If you ever had an app idea but didn't think you were technical enough, come and build, and I'll share the exact prompt template I used. And follow to see what I build next.
