What went right 😁
Right off the bat, from the very first iteration that Horizons created, the aesthetics were on point.
Although I didn’t include anything about colors, fonts, or how I wanted the app to look in my initial prompt, the result I got back was very modern and attractive. It seemed to lean in the style of what the Hostinger website might look like in a dark theme:
Beyond that, I was able to fix some initial bugs with prompts and I got the app to a point where it seemed to work. The buttons did what they were supposed to – at least it seemed like it at first glance. I could fill out all the fields, make my choices, export my made-up invoices as PDFs, etc.
However, upon doing some more comprehensive testing, it turned out that some of the features didn’t actually work the way they were supposed to. The first glances were misleading.
What went wrong ☹️
The biggest bug that I discovered was that the core feature of my app didn’t work. That is to say, it didn’t track time properly.
I was able to start the timer and watch it tick away, second by second. I was also able to use the pause and stop buttons. However, if I went to another tab and left it on – which you’d do in a real-life scenario – the actual time that passed when I went back to it was way more than what the timer showed.
For instance, I left it on for about an hour, but when I checked on it, it showed that only nine minutes had passed.
There were also some other bugs with certain data not being pulled into the dashboard.
In defense of Horizons, I did not attempt to fix these bugs with further prompts because I wanted to move on with the other experiment.
I also felt like for the amount of time I put into it (about three hours in total) and what I got in return was incredibly impressive. Perhaps not deployable just yet, but definitely mind-blowing. Especially when you consider that five years ago, it would have taken a professional developer a few weeks (if not longer) to get the same prototype.
And if I was a developer working on this as a serious project, I could export the code and manually fix the bugs myself.
2. One page website with interactive scroll effects
For the website experiment, I decided to rebuild my own portfolio site. I wanted to add some interactive scroll features to it that I saw on another one page website.
I initially attempted to paste the entire source code of the inspiration site into Horizons. However, I ended up going over the character limit by ~63,000 characters! 🙈 To work around this limitation, I took screenshots of the source code instead. I then fed those to Horizons in a few batches:
