Show HN: I build a Fantasy NHL app in 3 days with Claude AI

35 points

a year ago

I am not from North America, and moved there a couple years ago. After being invited to the first fantasy league and seeing the platform they were using, I couldn't bring myself to check it every day. An excel sheet would have been more appealing to use than this.

So I decided to create my own. But on the side? This would take ages. I am very confident with Rust and JavaScript, but it still takes ages to build something like that.

Good prompts, and a few long nights later, and I could create something fun and easy to use.

Have a look: https://fantasy-frontend.fly.dev/

The frontend is in React, the backend in Rust. I deployed both via fly.io. It was so simple and fast, it was shocking.

After it was deployed, I took 2-3 days to refactor everything and made it neat and tidy, so I could possibly open it up for general use with accounts etc.

The first time I built something with the help of AI not just for me.

The biggest help was certainly the UI and styling. I was never good at that. The first draft looked rough. I fed it some screenshots from NHL.com and told the model to "make it look nicer". What you see is I think the 20th iteration of the app, slowly improving, fixing bugs etc. But 90% with the help of AI.

I could have done 98% myself (except the styling part). And after each working iteration, I spend quite some time cleaning up so I can build on top of that.

The beauty? The cleaner, more modular code base saved tokens and made it easier for the model to refactor and understand. Strictly typed (TypeScritp in the frontend, Rust in the backend) helped as well!

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