What it means to OWN an AI generated App and sell it for profit

The following app on https://fluxtimer.pplx.app is life an publicly accessible

It is generated with Perplexity Pro version.

Took me 10 minutes for the prompt and the AI 10 minutes to generate a first local draft and another 2 minutes to publish this for the public.

So all in all 20 minutes for creating an advanced Workout-Timer similar to the Seconds Pro App with the difference that you can edit and upload your workout-routines in an *.md file rather than painstakinly edit it on your iPhone.

But the point here is not the feature. Its what follows afterwards.

As my goal with this app is to sell customized workouts for individuals the app must be predictably stable with the option to PREDICTABLY add new features without putting everything in danger customers are already used to use. There must be no change to what has worked so far.

And therefore I have to OWN the app code and all the building process the same way I had to won it before AI.

So Step 1 was to have the code local on MY machine in MY VSC editor under MY control using MY tools. And it took me 2 hours to find out whether this is doable at all.

Step 2: Creating a development environment with associated GitHub Repos to manage the code: another 2 hours (testing and documentation included).

Step 3: Building the code as is - failed - off course. Why? because its built and tested for Linux - not Windows. However, the AI has helped a lot and what would have taken my hours or even days figuring out the machine-code level cryptic errormessages where they are coming from, AI was able to point out DIRECTLY in which configuration files I had to change what to tweek it for Windows. Lesson: Either harness your AI that it really builds for your setup (but might not find then a solution that meets your requirements) or ask AI before building your code what it means for porting the code into your context.

Step 4. Once the app was compiled successfully on my machine, publishing it with Perplexity AI was a breeze: 5 minutes.

So what I have got so far:

In 20 Minutes I have generated a minimal clone that mimics the core functionality of a professional app (Seconds Pro).

It took me all in all 5 hours to OWN it in a sense that I could claim that I can keep it running like this 100% regardless of AI. Its MY code under my full control

Next steps:

It took me 2 days to figure out the exact additional features, final datastructure, interfaces with other apps, including sound, etc. to get the prototype ready. Most of it is conventional programming where I am just co-piloted by Perplexity for test case generation, documentation.

However, just adding a single "color" field to the database that steers the color of a step when displayed died a lot of unwanted code-change and has burned tokens where I have decided to roll back and do it manually: its cheaper!

In a nutshell:

Generating an app is when it comes to own and maintaine the code, like downloading an existing app from GitHub before AI with the difference that it is really our code and you have an AI which is absolutely great to explain this code to you, to fix errors and suggest for next steps, it already has prepared in the code (leading to a lot of code, that is never executes and might pose an unwanted security risk).

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What it means to OWN an AI generated App and sell it for profit