Behind the scenes of building HivePulse

Hive Pulse idea was from a long time on my mind, but only this year I could move to implement it. And this was doable because my brother, which is a genius developer, got the time to help me with technical stuff and also because now I could do vibe coding with AI. These two factors are the ones that propelled Hive Pulse app live on the market. While I am a software tester, one would say that I have the technical knowledge to do this project earlier. The thing is that while I do have some coding knowledge and did few simple projects, the idea of what would be behind Hive Pulse simply translated in hard work and long project. But with vibe coding and some guidance from my brother, that translated in a fraction of effort and time. And that alone is a motivation to make it happen, which I did.

Building an app is more than writing code

Many people think software development is only about coding, but this project showed me that coding is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. There is hosting, database design and setup, performance optimizations (yeah, I got some user feedback on this), bug fixing, testing and perhaps most importantly deciding which features actually bring value to users. Every new functionality starts as an idea and then goes through iterations before becoming part of the application. Sometimes what looks like a simple feature ends up being reworked multiple times to be useful and also provide the right usability. Having my brother helping with the architecture and technical decisions allowed me to avoid many mistakes that would have otherwise cost multiple reworkings.

AI accelerated the entire development process

One of the biggest surprises while building Hive Pulse app was not that AI could write code, but that it could reduce the time for it. From the leisure of my couch, after I drafted how a feature I wanted to look like I would give the right prompts for that to be implemented. And that would do the trick as compared to before when implementing a new feature would mean reading documentation, browsing Stack Overflow, experimenting and fixing unexpected errors. Now, many of those steps happen in a single conversation with an AI agent and with the right set of rules it would even check the results and that he did the right job. Technically speaking mostly as the business perspective I would still manage it. Actually I think this is an important factor as AI is somehow agnostic to what you want to achieve, so the thinking remains to the human being... for now. 😊

The community around it is motivating future developments

Looking back about two months ago, I realize that Hive Pulse probably wouldn't have existed a few years ago. The combination of agentic AI development and having an experienced developer to guide me whenever I needed, made this possible. The app is still evolving and I have more ideas for it to grow, but I wanted to launch it even if with a skeleton initially. In time I've added the "Goals" functionality which was positively embraced by the community which gave me more motivation to continue. I think until now about 50 users tried it and while that it is not a big number, it is a good incentive for me to continue with it.

I think that with the power that AI brings to the table, more projects can be fast tracked on the Hive blockchain to build more use cases. This is the first phase that should have an impact in this ecosystem. But that alone it is not enough. We need apps that will capture value from outside this ecosystem and bring it here in order to increase the value of Hive and create an uptrend for it. This can come from different types in the form of games, financial apps, photos, memes or whatever one could bring new users and new money. At the moment mostly we see new apps capturing the interest of Hive users, but that needs to be extended of this ecosystem. Once we succeed that, things will improve and will be better for everybody. And of course we need a market shift from bearish to bullish, but that along might not be enough.