v0 Micro Review

Following up from my prior blog post about AI toolchain, I’ve continued the experiment of giving AI a “one-shot” prompt.  As I discussed in my prior blog, this isn’t an attempt to actually make the application work, it’s a test of the platform’s ability to produce running code somewhat independently.  This means that this test is something of a “worst case” example but it shows the limits of what these platforms can do on their own.

This time I used v0 from Vercel.  I used the same one-shot prompt, “Build an app that stack ranks issues in a GitHub repo based on user-defined criteria.”  Unlike Replit, v0 assumed I was building a SaaS application and gave me a login screen:

That’s pretty nice because you’re going to need this with any real app unless you’re running it on your laptop.  So that was a nice surprise that I didn’t ask for.

The actual app is pretty similar to the one that Replit built:

A bit boring but functional.  I would give the nod to Replit here; the Replit UX was more colorful and an overall better visual experience, but v0 is completely competent and rational.

Unlike Replit, v0 figured out on its own that I couldn’t actually use this thing until I connected it to GitHub:

Which is pretty impressive.  Not only did it figure out that it couldn’t talk to GitHub, it suggested how to fix the problem.  Also note that it plumbed in the GitHub call on its own and just said, “Do this to make it actually work.”  Very nice.

However, then this happened:

Yeah, the solution that v0 suggested doesn’t actually work because v0 can’t set the environment variable for whatever reason (and no, this isn’t actually my token).  

As I pointed out in my previous blog, this is not entirely unexpected.  AI-based toolchain tools often struggle with security and identity issues.  I assume this is because there is so much industry variability here that they can’t just hard code the solution.

Of course Vercel is primarily a hosting company so the next step of their flow is to publish to Vercel and not to create your own code repo to deploy on your own.

That’s what happens if you hit the “Deploy” button.  However, they have a new beta feature to sync to GitHub which is also quite nice.  My preferred option is always to push it to a GitHub repo because then I can fool around with it using whatever other tools I want.  The reality is that you’re not going to get a simple prompt like this to create a real application, so you’ll need to have a code repo (GitHub or other) anyway.

To summarize, so far we have found that getting AI to build you a clickable prototype is pretty easy.  Getting AI to build a working app takes a bit more work.