Day 15 of 100 Days Agentic Engineer Challenge: AI App Builder Trap

Recently I tried several app builder apps like Codev, BoltNew, Lovable, SrcBook and Cline Extension in Visual Studio Code. I also tried two AI code assistants like Cursor and Aider. With app builders you start very fast, you get what you need in no time, every needed package is installed in the background, you are excited, you feel like you have superpowers and it takes as long as you understand the code and you follow the changes. If you just forget yourself and let the AI do too much for you, it ends bitterly, and it is the most case for people without programming knowledge, but maybe it doesn’t happen for these people, because they don’t go into deep water and for simple apps the AI app builders are ok, but it is still to extend the apps later. AI code assistants are more difficult, are for programmers and they can really extend your skills, but let’s first review my daily tasks routine.

Daily tasks routine

1.Physical activity — It’s my priority, started slowly, from 0 to 25 yesterday, and it’s the 15th day of my journey, I reached 100, not days, but push-ups ;)
2.Seven hours of sleep — Every night I think I should go to sleep earlier and it is slowly starting to work.
3.AI Agents — Learning about agents every day, watching YT, need to build one, a simple one, but one that will work autonomously 24h.
4.AI assistant: in queue
5.PAIC: in queue
6.Data Science: in queue

If you want to know what all these tasks are about, read the introduction to the 100 Days Agentic Engineer Challenge.

AI App Builders vs AI Code Assistants

Going back to AI App Builder and AI Code Assistants, I noticed a very important difference between them. AI app builders give non-programmers superpowers, they can start building apps, they can now do what was not possible before, but it’s more like a black box tool, if they don’t try to understand what AI has built for them, they won’t learn anything, eventually they will learn to communicate better with AI through more specific prompts, and maybe this is the way to start putting more logic into thinking and even learn programming in a different way, the same way children learn language, they start using it without questioning why they should construct sentences this way and not that way. The most important thing is to start paying attention to what AI is doing for us, otherwise we can expect an error loop and AI in destruction mode ;)

AI assistants, on the other hand, improve and accelerate the existing skills of programmers and make them better programmers, they learn new solutions and different implementations suggested by AI. Interesting combination of AI app builders and AI assistants is Cline extension, which is an autonomous coding agent that can write code, install packages and run the app.

I like the combination of Cline with DeepSeek, it’s not expensive, it doesn’t produce beautiful and modern layouts with nice effects, but it works. Cline works much better with Claude Sonnet, but it’s very expensive, maybe with time it will be more affordable, the most important thing is to start exploring coding with AI and one day build our own agent that will code full stack apps for us.