What I’ve been up to, yes it includes AI

So, what have I been up to lately? Back in May, I kicked off my longest-running AI project to date: Pushup Hourly. It’s still going, has been a massive help for me personally, and even got a couple of my friends to stay somewhat active.

I’ve also been spinning up a few new projects. One of them is a family exercise app. It’s pretty personal — everyone has access and can log in as each other (secured by a pin code). But the main goals here are simple:

• I want my kids to see that we are putting in the work.
• I want to challenge them to try and beat their records, and sometimes mine.
• I want to instill the idea that working hard is important, and its different every day.

Building this was a really interesting experience because I started using Lovable again. For a straightforward application like this, Lovable was incredibly easy to use. When I built the original Pushup app back in May, I used Manus AI. It felt easy at the time, but stepping into Lovable at the beginning of August was just on another level of simplicity.

What else have I worked on? In July, I built a super quick daily checklist app for my gymnast daughter.

• It worked out perfectly and was incredibly fast to put together.
• I used Gemini for this one because I wanted a completely local, HTML-only page without worrying about a backend or database.

More Games Please …

Most recently, on a recent trip back home, I noticed a few people playing Tetris Block Blast. It looked fun, so I downloaded it. I immediately realized it was full of terrible interactions and dark UX patterns around the ads. I actually had to teach the kids how to get around them, which was incredibly annoying. Even with the Tetris app, there wasn’t a straightforward option to just pay to turn the ads off entirely.

I looked for an alternative and found blockblast.org — a perfect, simple web game. It still had ads (though less annoying), but I really don’t want my kids messing with ads at all.

So, I took a different route:

• I grabbed a single screenshot of blockblast.org.
• I wrote one prompt

I’d like to make a web-based mobile game that is similar to Block Blaster by Tetris. Here’s a screenshot. I just want it for myself. I wanna play it locally, so I don’t need internet. I want it to save my high score.

• Lovable generated a great solution on the very first try. Literally, one-shot.

I played that initial version for about a week, and since then, I’ve been constantly getting feedback from the kids and making iterative improvements.

The absolute best part has been the update process. Here’s what my workflow looks like now:

• I’m on the train playing the game, heading to drop the kids off at camp.
• We find a bug or I get some quick feedback.
• I speak the updates into my phone.
• Within two minutes, I’m previewing the updated app.
• Thirty seconds later, it’s live in production and we keep playing.

These moments are just astounding. It makes me think about my friend Richard Alvarez, who is building a personalized container of apps that he can build, use, play, and manage himself. I can completely see Lovable filling that exact role for me. For $20 a month, it pays for itself just by giving me a sandbox to play, experiment, and keep all my work in one place.

In the startup world, you expect tools to come and go. I mentioned earlier I was dealing Manus AI, which was acquired by Meta within the last year, only for a legal judgment to reverse the acquisition. This week, I got a flood of emails from them saying, “Meta is no longer our owner, you need to back up and delete all your data, we’re starting fresh.” It’s chaotic, but that’s what happens.

Through all this noise, Lovable.dev has been a constant. I used it heavily early on, took a break to try out every other tool on the market, and now I’m back to absolutely loving it. It’s an amazing platform.

What I’ve been up to, yes it includes AI was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.