It's not a copilot it's a genie I never dreamt of!

Priyanka Shah — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:58:05 +0000

This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot Challenge : New Beginnings

What I Built

I built a creative productivity tool to create new year resolutions for each year, track them and celebrate their successful accomplishments. Add a badge to the completed ones.

Demo

Here's the link to my app: https://extraordinary-sfogliatella-4ec868.netlify.app/ For best experience, please open on your desktop.

Here's how my app took the shape:

1 - Initial brainstorming phase

2 - Somewhere in the middle

3 - Final App after 7 hours...

Repo

https://github.com/priyanka-hemant-shah/new-year-resolutions-tool

Copilot Experience

Although I am a skilled frontend web developer, this time I took a back seat in terms of coding and decided to let GitHub Copilot do all the technical hard work. I took the approach of bespoke app development. I neither went anywhere on the internet to brainstorm or find inspiration, nor did I do any prior research on the topic. Instead, I directly brainstormed along with Copilot via prompts and built the app as things progressed. I did some initial brainstorming with Copilot Chat using the GPT-4 model on what I wanted to build. Then, I created a starter app with CRA as guided by the model. I switched to Copilot Edits and the Claude Sonnet 3.5 for the next 80% of the app building. I visualized things and just prompted the model to build, and the super talented Copilot did that surprisingly well and quickly and was always open to feedback! For example, I asked to add an input in the center of the screen to add resolutions that would get added to a list below upon hitting the enter button on the keyboard. Then, I asked to refine the style in terms of size and border. Within just 7 hours, I was able to create a beautiful New Year Resolutions app to create new year resolutions for each year, track them, and celebrate their successful accomplishments with a confetti animation! I added a badge to the completed ones. I was also able to add a light and dark theme switcher and a music button in just the last few minutes! I did just 5% of the coding, and even in that, I got autocomplete suggestions!

Conclusion