I have been working with AI for a few years now. I started using it when I worked at Imaginary Friends. They use it for text generation. Then I experimented with image generation on Midjourney and Firefly extensively. I really had a lot of fun with that. I have never generated a functional program from scratch, though. Today, I decided to do that.
I use Gemini because its part of the Google ecosystem that I am fully entrenched in. I even have a Pixel phone and have zero complaints about it. If you know me then you know that’s a big deal because I enjoy a little bit of complaining and catastrophizing language. I’m working on it, but it is still a guilty pleasure. Anyway, I told Gemini to create a fractal generator in Javascript. I figured I could slide this onto a WordPress page without much trouble.
Well, sort of. It took all day to get something close to what I was aiming for. Like image generation you need to be very specific with the prompts. It works best if you lay out the basic functionality first instead of adding things in as an afterthought. I had to start over several times, and each iteration of the code was vastly different. The way it looked, loaded, and functioned was very different each time I asked Gemini to start over. This last time, it used Tailwind CSS, and that’s fine but unexpected. So, I was inadvertently exposed to two different avenues of web styles I never knew existed when working with this project. There were also slider buttons that use webkit styles and it took a minute to get that right. I’d never really tried to override WebKit styles.
I don’t think I learned to code better but I got that sucker on the page and its running. The mobile styles are crap but, I’m done for right now. I might come back to it later but I don’t know. I might be done. I want to create a similar program that makes geometric patterns. I think that will be fun. I kind of enjoyed this. It was something different and fun. 8/10 would try this mess again!
