From Idea to Deployment In A Couple Of Hours.

Disclaimer: this is a personal initiative, not representing any company or employer

🎧 Intro

Ever felt like building something cool but didn’t want to write a single line of code? Yeah, same. I spend my days buried in code, so the last thing I wanted was to stare at another blinking cursor at night. That led me to try something different for a (hobby) side project: build a music related web-app without designing or writing any type of code.

Here’s how I got it up and running in a few hours with AI doing both the frontend and backend. We'll also gonna dig deeper to see if the quality matches the speed...

💿 The Idea

I wanted to build a simple music streaming site focused on promotional and free music you won’t find on the usual platforms. Think niche mixtapes and rare releases that were once floating around as free downloads. Sure, some of it might still exist somewhere online, but jumping between Mixcloud, Soundcloud, Bandcamp AND YouTube (ugh)? Nope..hard pass! Manually adding local files to Spotify? Too much of a hassle and can't share the listening experience with the world.

Important disclaimer: It's not a pirating site. Slight legal gray zone? Maybe. But it's all in good faith.

I won’t share the full app here because that’s not the point, but I did manage to get the following features working (feelsgoodman):

• ✅ List albums/mixtapes with search and filtering

• ✅ Detail page with album info, tracklist, and a music player

• ✅ Music player controls — play, pause, next, previous

• ✅ Repeat functionality for tracks or albums

• ✅ Auto-playing full albums

• ✅ Installable app on mobile/desktop (PWA)

• ✅ Visualizations based on cover art color (desktop only — save that battery 🔋)

• ✅ Flip-to-back cover art (if available)

• ✅ Easy share link for albums

• ✅ Lock screen audio controls on mobile devices — made possible by the Media Session API (learned something new along the way!)

• ✅ Responsive layout for desktop and mobile

• ✅ Album favoriting

• ✅ Offline access to selected albums (no data/bandwidth consumption yay)

Not exactly the next big startup pitch, but it’s a smooth, nerd-friendly way to enjoy rare music.

🤖 The 'No-Code' part

So how do you build this without coding?

Introducing V0! It's a frontend-focused AI service I’d stumbled on a while ago. It lets you prompt your way to components, layouts, and even full apps. It’s kind of like having a personal dev who never sleeps but occasionally gets weirdly enthusiastic about spinning animations. V0 is not the only option for this. Claude Artifacts and Lovable offer comparable AI-driven app-building features (I have not compared these services)

Here’s what the V0 output gave me:

• ✅ Neatly organized React components (Next.js based)

• ✅ Pages for listings and album details

• ✅ Tailwind CSS (clean and uniform styling with less hassle)

• ✅ JSON-based metadata setup for albums

• Then I slapped on some custom artwork for extra flavor

Since there was no database in the initial version (intentionally), I needed to feed in album data manually. But manual typing? Not today! I asked Claude (another AI service) to generate a script that creates all the metadata needed: track names, durations etc. Want to add a new album? Just run the script. Done.

😬 So... Did It Work?

The app ran fine in V0 and after some local configuration tweaks it was running on my development environment. It met all the functional requirements and felt OK. But then I peeked under the hood (with some Claude AI help again), and well... things got spicy. The app worked fine... until my phone started slow-roasting itself.

Some not-so-great surprises:

• Memory leaks (can crash your device and kill performance)

• Code running unnecessarily on every interaction causing stutter

• Hidden visualizations still eating up resources (so long, battery!)

• Custom (mouse)cursor that broke usability

• Animations firing even when the element wasn’t visible

After feeding this back into the AI and iterating, most of these were fixed. The app felt faster, lighter, and more robust. Lesson learned: the first AI-generated version was not production-ready, even for a hobby side project. But with review and feedback loops the quality was there!

📌 Key Takeaways

Here’s what I walked away with:

• V0 outputs clean code: React, Next.js, Tailwind — all well-organized and exportable

• Looks can deceive: code and frontend may look fine but can still hide major issues. This is not to judge V0 or any other service: maybe i should have prompted differently (adding more technical requirements) or maybe iterating is just part of the process..

• V0 AI understands feature requests well: "Make this mobile-friendly", "Add a color theme", "Remove the horrible spinning music note loader". All handled gracefully

• It sometimes goes overboard: Background particles, moving shapes.. AI sit down!

• Mobile scaling is spot-on: UI scaled great across devices

• Dependencies need manual checks: AI might add outdated packages, pull from unofficial sources, or cause version conflicts. Luckily I only needed one external lib (for artwork color extraction), so it was easy to manage.

• Technical knowledge helps: not sure how non-devs survive the “vibe coding” life without losing it.

• Slap on some real (non-ai) artwork: suddenly your app looks less generic.

• It’s a great base: While it’s not fully scalable yet (needs DB and actual API structure), the foundation is solid and easy to build on.

🎤 Final thoughts

Creating this from scratch writing my own code would’ve taken me at least three times as long and frankly i wouldn't have done it at all. Instead, I had a working app in just a few hours. Giving me enough energy to continue playing with it. After launching it I even started getting positive feedback from users and fellow music lovers! This got me into contact with artists, DJs & producers that I won't have connected with otherwise.

Regardless of technical expertise, it's absolutely essential to thoroughly test & review your AI-generated project for performance, security, maintainability, accessibility, and scalability issues.

So yeah.. I guess I’m now a full stack developer. What’s stopping you from building a fun side project? Everything is possible! Curious what you'll cook up! 🧑🍳