DEV Community: Nithya Subramaniam

🛠️ After the Hack: What’s Next for Promptle (and Me)

Nithya Subramaniam — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 05:49:12 +0000

Hackathons are usually about building fast. But this one? It was about building deep.

What started as a quirky “Wordle meets ChatGPT” idea quickly turned into a full-blown creative engine—one that taught me more about prompt design, AI evaluation, and user delight than I ever expected.

But most importantly, it reawakened something:

A drive to build playful, purposeful tools that help people become more fluent in AI—not as users, but as co-creators.

🚀 The Transformation

👩🏽‍💻 From Hackathon Project to AI Skill Gym

Promptle was meant to be a fun daily game. But designing the AI scoring engine, bonus rounds, hint feedback, and streak logic taught me how powerful a well-structured creative loop could be.

I learned how to write meta-prompts that score other prompts
I designed prompt evaluation rubrics GPT could follow consistently
I experimented with prompt–response embeddings for scoring
I built a multi-step feedback loop that helped users refine their ideas—just like in real creative work
I debugged localStorage-based state management, async scoring requests, and bonus round triggers all within a serverless setup on Bolt

It stopped being just a "daily game"—it became a blueprint for how people can learn prompting like a craft.

🔮 Bigger Vision: From Promptle to Something More

Promptle started as a fun challenge—but it’s evolving into something bigger.

We’re now building PromptCraft: a home for creators to practice and perfect the art of prompting across AI tools. Think of it as a creative dojo for AI expression—part game, part studio, part community.

🧱 What PromptCraft Will Offer

🎯 Daily Challenge Mode

Featuring Promptle as the anchor experience to build creative muscles through structured practice.
✍️ Prompt Decks

Curated libraries of reusable prompts for writing, art, audio, and automation—grouped by skill, genre, or use case.
🔁 Remix Mode

See how others approached the same challenge and remix their prompt into your own.
💬 Feedback Loops

Get scored responses and coaching from AI (and eventually, a creative peer community). We're building new judge models that can blend GPT-4, fine-tuned evaluation agents, and rubric-guided scoring.
🧠 Creative Templates

Learn how to craft system prompts, dialogue flows, multi-shot inputs, or multimodal prompt chains. These include UI building blocks and editable components.
🚀 Level-Up Streaks

Track your growth across categories like specificity, creativity, efficiency, and complexity. Earn rewards and unlock themed creative weeks (e.g., Sci-Fi Week, Noir Mode, Museum Prompts, etc.)

🧪 Technical Evolution

Here's how PromptCraft is evolving behind the scenes:

AI Scoring as a Modular Engine

We're abstracting Promptle’s scoring logic into a prompt-evaluator module with swappable scoring agents (GPT-4, Claude, Mistral). These will use chain-of-thought meta-evaluation prompts and optional embedding checks.
Storage Options

For the MVP, we used localStorage to manage streaks and stats. For PromptCraft, we’re implementing optional sign-ins with Supabase and session tokens for syncing across devices.
Composable Prompt Templates

Each prompt card will soon have YAML/JSON-style schemas for modularity and remixing. Think:


json
  {
    "title": "Describe a city that exists only during eclipses",
    "tags": ["worldbuilding", "fantasy", "DALL·E"],
    "format": "narrative",
    "bonus_challenges": ["haiku", "limerick", "dialogue"],
    "ideal_response": "..."
  }

Promptle – The Daily AI Prompt Challenge

Nithya Subramaniam — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 05:42:11 +0000

👩🏽‍💻 Built by: Nithya Subramaniam
🔗 Deployed App: https://promptle.quest/
📹 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdPRvc4KxsM

🌟 Why I Built This

Ever feel like writing the perfect prompt is harder than getting the perfect AI response? That’s where Promptle was born—from a blend of Wordle-style daily play and the growing need to become fluent in prompting as a language.

I’m a daily Wordle player and a daily prompt experimenter, and I saw a fun opportunity to merge constraint-based creativity with skill building.

So I asked:

What if we turned prompt engineering into a game?

What if we made the act of prompting—normally an invisible interface—into the core interaction itself?

Promptle is the result: a daily game where your creativity is the key, and AI is your coach and your judge.

🎮 What Promptle Does

✍️ Daily Creative Challenge

Write a prompt that gets an AI to match a hidden "ideal" response.
🧠 3 Tries Per Day

After each attempt, you get smart feedback on:
- Accuracy (Did it match?)
- Creativity (Was it vivid?)
- Efficiency (Was it clear and short?)
🥇 Coded Feedback

Like Wordle, but for your best prompt performance.
🔓 Bonus Rounds

Score 9 or 10/10 to unlock twist rounds like:
- Rewrite as a haiku
- Turn into a noir detective story
🔥 Track Your Streaks

Daily momentum = daily learning.
📊 Stats & Feedback Loops

Client-side stats for daily usage, bonus round unlocks, and scoring insights.

It’s a bite-sized game that builds serious prompting muscles—one challenge at a time.

🛠️ Built Entirely in Bolt

Why Bolt?

Bolt was a dream for this project: zero setup, React-ready, instant prototyping, and seamless integration with OpenAI. I didn’t have to worry about dev environments or deploy pipelines. Just build, test, repeat.

💻 Core Stack

Layer	Tech
Frontend	React 18 + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS
Animations	Framer Motion
AI Backend	OpenAI GPT-4 + GPT-3.5
Scoring	GPT-powered evaluator + custom rubric
Storage	LocalStorage (for streaks and stats)
Deployment	Netlify (static build)

🧩 Key Features Built in Bolt

✅ Daily prompt generator w/ 24-hour reset logic
✅ 3-try score engine with AI-based evaluation
✅ Coded feedback UI (Wordle-style medals)
✅ Bonus Round unlock logic
✅ Local streak + celebration popup system
✅ Share-to-clipboard flow (like Wordle)
✅ Mock scoring fallback mode for no-AI demos

🤖 How AI Transformed My Dev Process

Using GPT-4 as both the user coach and prompt judge forced me to think differently:

✍️ I learned how to write prompts about prompting—meta-prompts that guide GPT to score human input
⚖️ I fine-tuned a rubric GPT could follow: balancing tone, creativity, and intent-matching
🧠 It wasn’t just code—I was crafting a feedback engine that teaches through play

Building Promptle became less about rules and more about dynamic evaluation—and Bolt let me iterate on that rapidly, all in-browser.

🎤 Sponsor Challenge Attempt: Eleven Labs

I tried to integrate Eleven Labs voice to announce scores—“You got a 9/10, poetic genius!”—but hit limitations:

⚠️ Rate limits + mobile playback bugs made testing inconsistent
🎯 Still exploring ways to cache voice snippets efficiently

I eventually fell back to text feedback with personality, but the voice integration will be back for v2.

🏆 Impact

A friend told me she finally understood why her image prompts weren’t working.
Another said Promptle helped him write better UX microcopy because he learned to be specific and concise.

Promptle turns trial and error into playful mastery.

🧡 Reflections

Promptle made me realise prompting is programming—just in natural language.

And Bolt made building that idea joyful, fast, and friction-free.

If AI is the next frontier of creativity, then Promptle is your daily warmup.