DEV Community: Rza Asadov

I Open-Sourced My AI-Powered Problem-Solving App. Developers Hated It.

Rza Asadov — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:42:46 +0000

Three months ago, I decided to build a messenger, originally only for a limited group of users: my friends, family, and a few work colleagues.

After I finished it and people around me started using it, I decided to open source the project. Today, around 400 people from my own environment use it every day, and it works reliably.

I built it with AI—not because I don't know how to develop software or because I lack experience. Quite the opposite. I have more than 20 years of software development experience, and I used that experience to design the architecture, make technical decisions, and build the React Native apps for both iOS and Android. Around 50% of the code was generated with AI, but 0% of the architecture was.

I open-sourced it for a simple reason: maybe someone will use it, maybe someone will learn something from it. Either way, I'm giving it away for free.

Later, I submitted the project to an open-source news website. The administrators accepted it because they believed it was a quality project, even though AI was used during development.

Then I started reading the comments.

Honestly, I was shocked.

About 90% of the comments were negative. Most people hadn't even tried the product—they simply saw "AI-built" and immediately decided it couldn't be good. At the same time, many others left positive feedback, starred the project on GitHub, and appreciated that it was open source.

That experience taught me something.

People often assume that developers are highly rational because of their profession. But sometimes we're just like everyone else—we reject something because it threatens the way we've always worked.

I don't see AI as replacing developers.

I see it as removing repetitive work so developers can spend more time solving real problems.

If I could build a fully functional messenger in just three months—one with many of the features people expect from apps like Telegram—it doesn't mean AI replaced engineering. It means AI helped me spend less time writing boilerplate and more time building the product.

Some people reacted as if I had claimed to be the next Zeus, trying to replace WhatsApp and Telegram overnight.

I wasn't.

I simply built something useful, shared it for free, and wanted to contribute to the open-source community.

Maybe that's exactly what open source is supposed to be about.

Human language became programming language.

Rza Asadov — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 10:58:10 +0000

Building an Open Source Privacy Messenger with AI as a Solo Founder

Rza Asadov — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:33:36 +0000

A while ago, I decided to answer a simple question:

Could a single developer build a modern messaging platform with the help of AI?

The answer turned out to be yes.

MeetVap is the result of that experiment.

I built it as a solo founder, but I definitely wasn't coding alone. AI became part of my daily workflow. ChatGPT helped me think through architecture, review design decisions, explain unfamiliar technologies, and solve countless small problems. When OpenAI released Codex (GPT-5.5), it became another huge productivity boost, helping implement features, refactor code, and speed up development.

Instead of spending hours searching through Stack Overflow or documentation, I could focus on building.

That doesn't mean AI built the project for me. Every architectural decision, feature, and integration still required engineering work, debugging, testing, and many iterations. But AI removed a huge amount of friction from the development process.

The project itself is a privacy-first messenger with a different philosophy from most existing platforms.

Some of the things I wanted from day one were:

No phone number or email required
local-first message storage instead of permanent server storage
PANIC PIN function
Voice and video calls
Real-time voice changer for outgoing and incoming calls
Mini Apps
Enterprise and self-hosted deployments

Building a messenger is much more complicated than it looks. Every feature touches networking, synchronization, mobile platforms, backend services, notifications, databases, encryption, and user experience.

As a solo developer, I ended up working on everything: backend APIs, React Native, infrastructure, deployment, App Store releases, CI/CD, and server administration.

Recently I made the project open source.

Privacy software should be transparent. If people are expected to trust a messenger, they should be able to inspect the code, report issues, and contribute improvements.

I also think this project is an interesting example of how modern AI tools are changing software development. They're not replacing engineers—they're dramatically increasing what a single engineer can accomplish.

I'm excited to see where both the project and AI-assisted development go next.

If you're interested in messaging systems, React Native, distributed systems, or building ambitious projects as a solo founder, I'd love to hear your feedback.

Thanks for reading!

GitHub: https://github.com/RzaAsadov/MeetVap

Website: https://meetvap.com

DEV Community: Rza Asadov

I Open-Sourced My AI-Powered Problem-Solving App. Developers Hated It.

Human language became programming language.

Building an Open Source Privacy Messenger with AI as a Solo Founder

opensource

ai

reactnative

programming