mobile-app-development

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A month-long task in just (opens in new tab)

This blog post explores how LY Corporation reduced a month-long development task to just five days by leveraging "vibe coding" with Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Cursor. By shifting from traditional, rigid documentation to an iterative, demo-first approach, developers can rapidly validate multiple UI/UX solutions for complex problems like restaurant menu registration. The author concludes that AI's ability to handle frequent re-work makes it more efficient to "build fast and iterate" than to aim for perfection through long-form specifications. ### Strategic Shift to Rapid Prototyping * Traditional development cycles (spec → design → dev → fix) are often too slow to keep up with market trends due to heavy documentation and impact analysis. * The "vibe coding" approach prioritizes creating "working demos" over perfect specifications to find "good enough" answers through rapid feedback loops. * AI reduces the psychological and logistical burden of "starting over," allowing developers to refine the context and quality of outputs through repeated interaction without the friction of manual re-documentation. ### Defining Requirements and Solution Ideation * Initial requirements are kept minimal, focusing only on the core mission, top priorities, and essential data structures (e.g., product name, image, description) to avoid limiting AI creativity. * ChatGPT is used to generate a wide range of solution candidates, which are then filtered into five distinct approaches: Stepper Wizards, Live Previews with Quick Add, Template/Cloning, Chat Input, and OCR-based photo scanning. * This stage emphasizes volume and variety, using AI-generated pros and cons to establish selection criteria and identify potential UX bottlenecks early in the process. ### Detailed Design and Multi-Solution Wireframing * Each of the five chosen solutions is expanded into detailed screen flows and UI elements, such as progress bars, bottom sheets, and validation logic. * Prompt engineering is used iteratively; if an AI-generated result lacks a specific feature like "temporary storage" or "mandatory field validation," the prompt is adjusted to regenerate the design instantly. * The focus remains on defining the "what" (UI elements) and "how" (user flow) through textual descriptions before moving to actual coding. ### Implementation with Cursor and Flutter * Cursor is utilized to generate functional code based on the refined wireframes, using Flutter as the framework to ensure rapid cross-platform development for both iOS and Android. * The development follows a "skeleton-first" approach: first creating a main navigation hub with five entry points, then populating each individual solution module one by one. * Technical architecture decisions, such as using Riverpod for state management or SQLite for data storage, are layered onto the demo post-hoc, reversing the traditional "stack-first" development order to prioritize functional validation. ### Recommendation To maximize efficiency, developers should treat AI as a partner for high-speed iteration rather than a one-shot tool. By focusing on creating functional demos quickly and refining them through direct feedback, teams can bypass the bottlenecks of traditional software requirements and deliver user-centric products in a fraction of the time.