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Sulynn AI
Sulynn AI

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I shipped 7 AI tools in 2 months. Here's the boring code I kept rewriting.

#ai #productivity #sideprojects #webdev

I'm a solo dev. Over the past 2 months I built 7 small AI tools — a paper rewriter, an email generator, a resume optimizer, you get the idea. Different niches, same skeleton.

Every single time, I was rebuilding the same boring plumbing:

  • API key input + localStorage + show/hide toggle
  • Streaming output (SSE parsing, buffering, abort handling)
  • Responsive UI shell (header, hero, input/output panels)
  • SEO boilerplate (meta tags, Open Graph, JSON-LD)
  • Error mapping (401/402/429/network)

None of this is hard. It's just long. About 15 hours of work each time, mostly copy-paste from the last project with tweaks.

The pattern 

API key management    → 2 hrs
SSE streaming + abort → 4 hrs
Responsive UI shell   → 6 hrs
SEO setup             → 2 hrs
Deploy + configure    → 1 hr
-------------------------
Total per tool        → 15 hrs
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The actual "AI" part — defining modes, writing system prompts, picking a niche — was 30 minutes. The other 14.5 hours was infrastructure.

What I did about it

I distilled all of it into a single static boilerplate. No framework, no build step, no backend. One config.js file defines everything:

const CONFIG = {
  site: { name: 'My AI Tool', description: 'Powered by DeepSeek' },
  api: {
    endpoint: 'https://api.deepseek.com/v1/chat/completions',
    model: 'deepseek-chat',
  },
  modes: [
    { id: 'rewrite', label: 'Rewrite',
      prompt: 'Rewrite this text: {{input}}' },
    { id: 'expand', label: 'Expand',
      prompt: 'Expand this idea: {{input}}' },
  ],
}
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That's literally the only file you touch. The engine handles API calls, streaming, UI, SEO, errors.

Why no framework?

I tried React. I tried Next.js. They're great, but for a single-purpose AI tool with one input and one output, they're overkill. You ship to GitHub Pages, you're done. No server costs, no cold starts, no Vercel limits.

The key insight: AI wrapper tools are static frontends. The API call goes browser → LLM directly. There's no backend to speak of.

What's included

  • API key management (localStorage, validation, auto-save)
  • SSE streaming with cross-chunk buffering and AbortController
  • Responsive UI (header, hero, config, panels, toast, status bar)
  • SEO (meta, Open Graph, Twitter Card, JSON-LD FAQ schema)
  • Config-driven engine (edit ONE file)
  • Zero-cost deploy (GitHub Pages, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages)
  • Copy & toast, error handling, accessible markup

How I use it

  1. Edit config.js (define modes, prompts, branding)
  2. Push to GitHub
  3. Enable GitHub Pages
  4. Post on Reddit / Indie Hackers
  5. Maybe add AdSense or affiliate links

Total time from idea to live: ~1 hour. Most of that is writing good prompts.

The honest part

This isn't a get-rich-quick thing. Each tool makes maybe $5-30/month in ad revenue or $0-2 sales. But building 10 of them with 15 hours each (150 hours total) vs. 10 hours total (1 hour each) — that's a 15x difference in shot count.

More shots = more chance one hits.

If you want to skip the 15-hour boilerplate and just build tools, I put the whole thing up at shipai.work. $199 one-time, lifetime updates.

But honestly — even if you don't buy it, the pattern is the takeaway: stop rebuilding infrastructure, start shipping products.

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