After a decade of failed attempts, AI helped this person finally ship their app
The author has wanted to build a social review site for TV shows and movies since the early 2010s, inspired by the review-and-recommendation culture of old Orkut communities. The idea was to let people review individual seasons or episodes, not just give one overall rating. After Orkut shut down, users scattered to Facebook, VK, Reddit, and Quora, but nothing filled that gap — leaving mainly IMDb, where reviews were sparse or buried in unrelated communities.
The author has depression, and it repeatedly derailed the project: learning led to months of progress lost and a stop, then starting over with React ended the same way, a cycle that repeated for more than ten years with no finished project. That changed once arrived. The author handled planning, design, and overall , while Claude and Gemini (via ) handled writing the actual code and syntax.
By dividing the work this way, the author was finally able to build and ship the project.
Key points
- Wanted a social site for season/episode-level TV and movie reviews since the early 2010s
- Depression derailed two separate learning attempts, first in then React
- Kept planning and for themself, delegated code writing to Claude and Gemini ()
- That split in responsibilities let them finally ship after more than a decade of false starts