Tools: How I Rebuild My Hobby Project In Over 2 Weekends With Chatgpt &...

I rebuilt my hobby project in over 2 weeks with the help of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Antrophic's Claude (Sonnet 4.5). In this post, I am going to share the details on how I do it: the fun things, the trade-offs, and takeaways.

I started this project called github-langs (site: https://gitstats.wildans.us) back in 2017. It was the very first time for me to get into so-called open-source project. I remember vividly that Hacktoberfest got me into it.

For those who don't know, "Hacktoberfest" was a month-long activity that held by DigitalOcean and GitHub (at least how it was in 2017) where developers around the world try to collaborate each other in the spirit of open-source project: everyone can be anything from maintainer to contributor and users.

And I did become one of them. I created the github-langs project, a web-based application to visualize the language distribution for a given github account. This is how it looked back then (and still is at https://gitstats.wildans.site):

Super simple. You enter a GitHub username and once it's found on GitHub database, it will visualize the language distribution (if an account does have repository with certain language, of course). Some of the features are the following:

I have been meaning to rebuild this project from several years ago. But due to other commitments and stuffs, I haven't really gotten the time to do it. I have some ideas, both for the features as well as technical improvements, but it was just playing around over my head. Haven't really put it into concrete, actionable ideas.

Since this become a thing, I can see that people with limited technical proficiency and knowledge can really build something out of nothing. Then I think; with my "enough" technical knowledge and proficiency, surely I can make that long, sleep ideas come into reality, can't I?

Here is what it looks like now (you can access this via https://gitlingo.app).

As you can clearly see, there are major overhaul for the functionality and UI/UX. I could say this new version offers simple, intuitive, and "elegant" look.

First and the foremost, this isn't something that can be done with "one-shot" prompt like: "Hey Claude, I want a new version of this new app with the details. Please build me for it."

Source: Dev.to