https://harshdeepgupta.substack.com/p/6-months-and-485-my-journey-into
It’s been six months now. Data, backend, frontend, Electron, CI, testing, landing page, design, Supabase, Resend, Lovable… the list goes on. What I thought would be a quick sprint turned into a marathon, and the todo list still doesn’t seem to end.
My plan in the beginning was simple: build something quick and dirty, and share it with other people. Something about that felt very human, very exciting. So I whipped up a web app overnight using Cursor. Then as I thought more about the problem, details emerged. I learned the hard way that web apps don’t play nicely with local file systems, especially when they need to handle thousands of large photos.
I then thought maybe an electron app would help with my objectives. Again, I think I gave AI too much credit and dove right in. I realized the real work had just begun. Packaging, distribution, signing binaries — all those invisible details that make something feel like a product. The funny part? I discovered these only toward the end, totally a surprise (not a good one, still waiting for my apple developer account approval) after months of building.
Even the landing page became its own project. I used Lovable to generate one, and soon enough, I was knee-deep in building flows for email signups, testing Resend integrations, tweaking copy, fixing layouts. It became another app in itself. If I were to do it again, I’d probably try something like Framer. I can’t even count the number of prompts I spent just refining that one page.
This is, roughly, the answer to "where is all the shovelware". Building an app requires doing a lot of different things, and the AI isn't good at all of them yet. But it is good at some of the most time-consuming ones. And getting better at the rest.