Comment by deanc
1 day ago
I built a basic version of this for myself with a prompt in chat gpt in an afternoon. It's great that you've built this yourself, but where's the magic? If it's your prompt it can probably be extracted in a few minutes by those who know how to do so.
Why not finish, publish it to the store and get income if it was that straightforward? There's a long way to go between a toy application to demonstrate a product, and something on shelves actually selling. In other words, you can most often quickly tackle the concept or trivial parts of an app, but it's much harder to get a real product out, even if the implementation looks straightforward on surface.
This is like the story of the businessman and the fisherman.
Why on earth are you going to build out a whole product: doing marketing, security, incorporation, customer support, etc… just so you can finally arrive at the end result of… teaching yourself a language?
The toy app is 100% of the value. You don’t need all that other shit, you just need a really good prompt. It’s exactly how you don’t need to search websites anymore, just ask AI for the answer and get it immediately. You don’t need a full app, just ask AI exactly what you want.
you think a chat UI is the apex UX? Most of us don't agree with that. On top of that, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini apps all sucks.
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That's exactly my point. This is at best a toy application driven by a prompt that many people will be able to extract and recreate. Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem. Creating magic and making people come back to learn the language is entirely different and I don't see anything magical here.
I think you're missing the point entirely. Yes, it's easy to reproduce 5% of the effort. But it doesn't make sense to call the whole 100% of the effort a toy application. Given market pressure, and if it was the case, we'd be flooded with applications like that. Being the master of 5% of the effort doesn't amount to much, and dismissing the other 95% as a toy when it requires a lot more work and as much expertise throughout doesn't make much sense. Drawing an airplane doesn't make it fly.
> Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem
Exactly! Not difficult, right? Making and selling a product out of it is called marketing. It is not rocket science, but many engineers can't grasp it.
GPT Wrappers are the new CRUD. There is no innovation in Trello, Jira and any other SaaS, they are just marketed products that thousands of people here in HN could code better, but they don't, because they are wasting their time pointing that other people's products are not a difficult problem to solve.
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> We wanted something that would talk with us — realistically, in full conversations — and actually help us improve. So we built it ourselves. The app relies on a custom voice AI pipeline combining STT (speech-to-text), TTS (text-to-speech), LLMs, long term memory, interruptions, turn-taking, etc. Getting speech-to-text to work well for learners was one of the hardest parts — especially with accents, multi-lingual sentences, and noisy environments. We now combine Gemini Flash, Whisper, Scribe, and GPT-4o-transcribe to minimize errors and keep the conversation flowing.
Your prompt can't do this. I know because I've been trying to build something similar and a prompt just isn't enough. You need multiple LLMs and custom code working together to achieve realistic conversations.
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I knew this would be a reply. Dropbox was magical and just worked and took a huge amount of pain points away from a complicated protocol. Building an LLM wrapper doesn't make a product in 2025.