DEV Community: Basit Jumani

I abandoned my AI-built website after backlash. I checked its analytics today and I was shocked.

Basit Jumani — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:24:55 +0000

Basit Jumani

Oct 1

The website I once felt embarrassed about is growing on its own.

#ai #programming #learning #beginners

5 min read

The website I once felt embarrassed about is growing on its own.

Basit Jumani — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:54:23 +0000

Hey, I’m Jumani.

Before you visit the website, I want to tell you a little bit about me and how this whole thing started.

At the beginning of 2026, I was obsessed with one thing building something of my own.

The problem was, I couldn’t code. Not even a little. I didn’t know the C of coding.

At the same time, I was deeply into AI. I followed almost every AI update, new model launch, and major development. I knew what was happening across the AI space to the point where I used to joke that I was an AI buddy.

Somewhere along the way, I came across the term “vibe coding.”

I got curious.

I started researching what it actually meant, how it worked, what tools people were using, and whether someone with almost zero coding experience could actually build something with it.

I went deep into it.

Within about a week, I had learned enough about vibe coding that I felt ready to try building my own website.

But there was one problem.

There were so many vibe-coding platforms, and I had no idea which one I should use.

So I decided to try almost every one I could.

I started with Replit because I had already heard a lot about it. I tried it, but I wasn’t really happy with the results.

Then I tried Bolt.

Then Bubble, Emergent, v0, and several others.

For every platform, I tried to get as much as I could from the free plan because I simply couldn’t afford paid subscriptions.

But then I tried Lovable.

And for some reason, it clicked.

When I first used it, I was genuinely fascinated by what I could build with it. At the time, it was giving me a lot of things I wasn’t seeing together on other platforms — analytics, SEO, security, privacy, and many other things that were useful when building a real website.

And the biggest part for me?

I could do all of that on the free plan.

So I decided that Lovable was going to be part of my journey.

And that’s where the story of Halcyon begins.

Halcyon was a simple photo-editing website I built with vibe coding. It gives you 30+ presets that can quickly change the look of your photos without needing to understand complicated editing tools like Lightroom.

And as I mentioned earlier, I still hadn’t paid for any AI or development tool.

I didn’t have the money had no mentor,

So I built everything using free plans - prompting with ChatGPT’s free plan and building with Lovable’s free plan.

I was genuinely happy.
I had built my first website.

And the funny part?
When I started, I still barely knew how to code.

But building Halcyon pushed me to actually start learning.

I started learning coding stated from HTML,CSS while I was building the website yeah, I know weird way to start learning coding.

But it worked for me.

By August 2026, I had finished the first version of Halcyon and published it using Lovable’s free domain because I couldn’t afford a custom domain.

Then I started promoting it alone, still no mentor, no one else with me just me doing everything my own at the time, I had almost no followers on X still, I tried everything I knew.

I shared it in communities, Substack, on X, dev and anywhere else I thought real people might actually discover and use it.

At first, barely anyone came.
But slowly, people started visiting.
A few used it.

Then a few more.

Eventually, after a lot of effort, Halcyon crossed 100+ visitors from around the world.

And then came the part I wasn’t prepared for.

Some people started making fun of the fact that it was AI-built.People pointed out the Lovable branding.

Some of the feedback was useful, and some people were genuinely supportive, but the negative comments started getting to me.

Eventually, I stopped.

I went quiet.

For about a month and a half, I didn’t even look at the website.

I removed almost every trace of it from my profiles, stopped promoting it, stopped prompting, stopped marketing it and started posting about completely different things.

I basically abandoned it.

Then one day, I randomly decided to check the analytics.

And I was shocked.

The website was still getting visitors.

No marketing.
No promotion.
Nothing from me.

And somehow, it had crossed 200+ visitors from around the world.

People were still discovering it.
People were still using it.

And even more surprising, Google and ChatGPT were starting to recommend it.

I checked the analytics more closely.People were coming in every day.

I genuinely didn’t know what to think.Then it hit me.

I had spent all that time worrying about what people were saying about an AI-built website that I had forgotten to look at what the actual users were saying and while I was busy feeling embarrassed about it, the website was quietly doing something I didn’t expect it to do.

It was growing without me.

That changed how I looked at the whole thing So I started talking about Halcyon again not hiding the fact that it was AI-built not hiding the fact that I used Lovable.

Actually doing the opposite.
I started showing people the numbers and telling them:

This is an AI-built website.
I stopped caring about whether people thought that made it less legitimate. Because at the end of the day the website didn’t care who built it.

It just had to be useful enough for someone to visit, use and come back.

And that was probably the lesson I needed.

I thought I had failed because people laughed at how I built it.But while I was looking at the opinions, I completely missed the evidence.

The website was still alive.
People were still finding it.
And it was growing when I wasn’t even touching it.

So I came back to it.

I started working on Halcyon again, making improvements and bringing it back to where I wanted it to be.

I still have a lot to learn about coding, building products, marketing and everything that comes with creating something from scratch.

But now I look at Halcyon differently.It’s not the website I was embarrassed about anymore.

It’s the first thing I built when I didn’t even know how to code and maybe that’s the part I should have been proud of all along

Halcyon is here

Everything I did solo
Still learning Coding, building random things every day and figuring out what to build next.

still no mentor. still figuring it out. but i'm building again.

An internet joke made me build this.

Basit Jumani — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 05:49:39 +0000

few weeks ago, I noticed something funny.

People weren't measuring time in years anymore.

They were measuring it in "before GTA VI."
"I graduated before GTA VI."
"I got married before GTA VI."
"I built my first business before GTA VI."

It started as a meme, but the more I saw it, the more it felt like something bigger.

Everyone was waiting for the same game, but everyone had a completely different story.

That made me wonder:

What if you could turn your own "Before GTA VI" story into something you'd actually want to share?

So I started building.

The goal wasn't to make another meme generator.

It was to create something that felt personal—a simple card that tells your story while the internet keeps
waiting.

Getting the idea was easy.

Designing something people would actually share wasn't.

I went through multiple card designs, removed features that added noise, rewrote the experience several times, and kept asking one question:

"Would I post this on my own Story?"

If the answer was no, it didn't stay.

The project is still evolving, but it's finally at a point where I'm happy to put it in front of real people.

I'd love to hear what you think.
What works?

What feels off?

And if you were making this, what would you change?

Every piece of feedback helps shape the next version.👇

Try it out

4 months. 4 ideas. 0 launches. Today, that changes.

Basit Jumani — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:11:25 +0000

Hi, I'm Basit Jumani.

Over the past 4 months, I worked on 4 different ideas.

None of them made it past the prototype stage.

Not because they were terrible. Some of them actually had potential.

The real problem was me – I kept finding reasons to stop before putting anything in front of real users.

That ends today.

I finally decided to ship something instead of chasing perfection.

I built a simple website where you upload your photo, choose a color grading preset, adjust the intensity, and download the result.

I built it using the free versions of ChatGPT and Lovable because I can't afford the paid plans yet. I also couldn't buy a custom domain, so it's running on Lovable's free domain for now.😅

This is the first project I've ever shared publicly, so I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback. Try it out, break it, tell me what works, what doesn't, and what you'd improve.

Every comment helps me build something better.

https://halcyonai.lovable.app/

Thanks for being part of the journey.

I'm a Younger Builder. I've Failed 4 Times. Here's why I'm Still Going.

Basit Jumani — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:22:49 +0000

This is the first post in a series where I document everything — the ideas, the failures, the process, and the journey

Who Am I?
My name is Basit. I'm a younger builder, from Pakistan, and I'm an engineering student who spends more time building products than studying for exams.
I see the world like a lens. Always observing. Always framing. Always looking for what others miss.
I don't have a computer science degree. I don't have a mentor sitting next to me. I don't have a community around me that thinks the way I do. Most people in my environment don't understand what I'm trying to do and honestly, that includes my family.
But I'm building anyway.
The Honest Part Nobody Talks About
Here's something most "young builder" stories skip:
I've worked on 4 ideas. None of them made it past the prototype stage. Not because the ideas were terrible some of them were actually decent but because I kept finding reasons to stop before I ever reached real users.
That's not failure. That's something worse: quitting before you even get to fail.
I realized this recently when I read about Pieter Levels the indie hacker behind Nomad List, Remote OK, and a dozen other products. The man failed 90+ times before anything worked. Ninety. And he kept going. Not because every idea was brilliant, but because he treated each one as an experiment, not an identity.
I was treating my ideas like they were me. So when an idea felt shaky, I felt shaky. And I stopped.
That ends here.
What I'm Actually Doing Now
I'm not launching a product today. I'm not announcing a startup.
What I am doing is this: I'm spending 3 days observing my own life every frustration, every "I wish there was something for this" moment and writing it down. No filtering. No immediately googling if it exists. Just raw observation.
Because the builders I respect Pieter Levels, Kumar Shah they didn't start with ideas. They started with problems they genuinely felt.
I want to find something I genuinely feel.
Why I'm Writing This Publicly
Two reasons.
One: Accountability. If I document this publicly, I can't quietly disappear when things get hard. You'll notice.
Two: I want to find my people.
Right now, I exist in an environment where nobody around me thinks like this. Not my classmates. Not my family. The conversations I want to have about building, about systems, about why certain companies win I can't have them in my daily life.
So I'm building that community here. One post at a time.
If you're someone who obsesses over founder stories, who reads about how Pinterest or Airbnb survived their early days, who thinks about product and distribution at 2am this blog is for you. And honestly, it's for me too.
What's Next
I don't have a clean answer to where this goes.
A year from now, I want someone to ask me "what did you build?" and have a real answer. Right now, I don't. And that gap between who I am and who I'm trying to become is exactly what this blog is about.
I'm going to document every step. Every idea. Every dead end. Every small win.
Follow along if that sounds interesting.
— bjumani
Builder. Observer. Work in progress.