I'd love your feedback, please give it a try and let me know what works and what doesn’t! The iOS app is here.
This is my first flutter app and iOS release, and it felt like a big accomplishment just to put out a true mobile app (though it works on desktop just fine, thanks flutter... Android native coming soon!). Now that I've passed that hurdle, I've even got another app in the cooker.
What's the point of this thing?
I have a lot of trouble picking gifts for people, and I find browsing Amazon or other e-commerce sites boring if not frustrating. I had a couple of fruitful conversations with LLMs about gifts for upcoming birthdays, and thought, "Why not make something a little more purpose built for this type of conversation?"
My tools & process
I leveraged Claude Code heavily while building. I started off with Cursor, then Windsurf, but things really kicked into high gear with Claude Code. I got the $100 subscription, and almost all of the work was done within about 2 weeks. I only found myself rate limited maybe once a day, and even then, I’d been working for hours and it was the right move to take an hour-long break. But you do get downgraded from Opus to Sonnet in about 20 minutes… although TBH never hurt code or task completion quality that much.
On the manual side of things, I did have a fair amount of wrangling I needed to do with Xcode, as well as a lot of things to do in AWS and on my server. Claude wrote up instructions for much of this, but I reviewed and executed them.
Claude only trashed the local copy of my DB once. Good thing the application doesn’t really need it to function properly. It’s mainly just a cache.
What other technology is involved?
As little as possible, intentionally! Swift/xCode/iOS platform of course, a pretty straightforward stateless backend written in common scripting language, a lightweight DB for some caching and rate limiting, plus a few pieces of AWS infra. From my perspective, nothing fancy. I suppose it’s all relative though, and I do work in tech, so I have at least a little hands-on experience with most of these things. iOS and Flutter were least familiar part for me.
What LLM(s) does it use?
I pretty exclusively use Claude Sonnet 3.7 right now, with some fallback options to other Sonnet versions and ChatGPT when Claude is erroring due to heavy load.
My background & skill level
I have a reasonable tech background, so I probably could have built it without coding agents; it would just have taken 10x as long. This isn’t a one-shotted CRUD app or to-do list, but it’s not extremely complex either IMHO. My feeling is that, without my tech background, I’d have been lost or stuck enough to give up many times throughout building, even with heavy assistance from coding agents. For one thing, that’s because I often led the coding agent to the right way to build or debug through suggestions like, “verbose curl the backend and inspect the headers” or “why isn’t this process async? That’s an unbelievably dumb way of doing it.” (invariably, the response is “Of course!” or, “You’re completely right!” and then a revision that makes more sense.)
Of course there's a business model. What is it?
The gift recommendations are all Amazon Affiliate links. When a user clicks on one and then makes a purchase through Amazon, I may make a small commission. If you're wondering... no, I'm nowhere near recovering my development costs, lol :)
Is it any good?
My personal opinion: the chats can be fun, the quality of the gift recommendations is a work in progress. I'd really love for the GiftyPals crew to come up with unexpected and brilliant gift ideas leveraging deep insights into the souls of the gift giver and recipient... have a few experiments in that vein, but nothing I'm really psyched about yet.
Anyway, thanks so much trying it out! I really value all feedback. I think the app experience is superior UX-wise, but you’ll get a good feel for things on web too.