Sorry it took so long...

First of all, I’d like to apologize to the early subscribers of this newsletter.

It took a while before I decided to pen the inaugural edition.

So here you are, eager to learn about AI-assisted coding.

Thank you for your curiosity!

The story so far…

Some context to start with.

I was born in 1974, 10 years before the introduction of the Macintosh, 11 years before the release of Windows, 24 years before the advent of Google and the list goes on and on…

I belong to the Internet’s prehistory. I’m a (non-extinct) dinosaur in digital terms.

I could have been much more involved in coding at an early age.
It would have been a very wise move.

Actually, my godfather bough me a ZX Spectrum when I was 12 years old.

It was a very decent piece of kit. I remember “developing” some rudimental games featuring a stickman who was supposed to represent Indiana Jones.

This was in 1986.

I was involved in multiple digital ventures from the late 1990s, as a founder, a marketer and a product manager, but I never considered myself a true coder.

In 2015 I started shipping tons of WordPress sites for SMBs but I was just scratching the surface, first with Divi then with Elementor, merely fine tuning some CSS rules here and there.

In September 2022, well into my 49th year on this pale blue dot, I finally decided to explore Python. I got hooked!

It was 18 months ago.

Since then, I’ve shipped tons of local scripts to optimize my personal workflows and 3 consumer-facing micro SaaS in the creative audio space:

aijinglemaker.com

aishowmaker.com

aithercast.com

11,000+ users have already signed up and those tiny ventures are profitable, even if they don’t generate life changing revenues ($3,000 per month at the moment, or $3K MRR as we say in startup lingo).

I consider them as exciting learning experiments.

I also started developing micro SaaS for a small roster of clients (by the way, if you’ve been postponing your micro SaaS side hustle for ages, desperately looking for a “CTO cofounder”, don’t hesitate to get in touch, I can help).

One Simple Stack

Enough about the genesis. Let’s talk about code.

I’ve been asked by a lot of people on IndieHackers and Reddit how I approach AI-assisted coding.

How is it possible to ship a micro SaaS in a week?

Well, the most crucial aspect is to understand the basic inner workings of a web app, the overall architecture. Here’s a schema I recently created on Canva, featuring Lego buildings generated by MidJourney.

You’ve got the frontend. That’s what your users will interact with. The backend, where you’ll develop the “business logic”, connected to a database and some media assets storage provider.

All my projects are built using the exact same stack: Flask/Python, HTML, (Tailwind)CSS, (vanilla)JS + MySQL and AMZ S3. They’re all deployed as single web apps on Railway.app. I’m also using Celery with Redis in some projects.

I don’t use React, NextJS, Vue or any other modern JS framework. They’re amazing and enable you to decouple the frontend from the backend, which is easier to maintain for larger projects. But I prefer to keep things simple and ship fast. I almost never draw mockups (maybe I should but that’s my style). I always start with a short prompt. I’m constantly iterating, mainly in Visual Studio (I started on PyCharm).

Coming Up Next: Generating Boilerplates

In the next edition of my newsletter, I’ll share some examples of early prompts and code boilerplates.

If you want to get a glimpse of what’s possible today in AI-assisted coding, you can watch one of my latest videos where I explain how to deploy a simple Flask web app on Railway.

Don’t hesitate to ask me your questions by replying to this email. I’m online 15 hours a day.

Stay tuned!

Frédérick
[email protected]