Hey guys,
Recently in my society, I attended an AI seminar session.
At first, it honestly did not seem that useful 😅
It was mostly:
- general knowledge about AI chatbots
- the history of AI
- a few cool examples
…but nothing that really stood out to me and my friend.
Until the host casually mentioned something interesting:
“Even students can now build and deploy apps using AI… and maybe even earn money from them.”
Now THAT got us thinking 👀
And somehow, within the next few minutes, we came up with the idea of building a volleyball tournament scoring and tracking website for our society tournament.
The more we discussed it, the bigger the idea became:
- Live standings
- Match schedules
- Team tracking
- Admin dashboard
- Live score updates
And somehow it slowly became a competition between me and my friend to see who could build the better app 😭
A healthy competition, of course.
“This Should Take 2 Hours Max” 😅
We genuinely thought this would be super easy.
Our original plan was basically:
- Ask ChatGPT to generate a prompt
- Paste it into some AI app builder
- Add a few finishing touches
- Become millionaire startup founders overnight ✨
Simple, right?
Yeah… not exactly.
I started by asking ChatGPT to create a detailed master prompt for the app.
It asked me everything:
- app purpose
- functionality
- design preferences
- tech stack
- features
- backend requirements
And then it suggested using:
- v0 by Vercel for generating the app
- Supabase for the backend
So I copied the generated prompt into v0…
…and within 5 minutes…
BOOM 💥
The app preview was ready.
The UI Looked Incredible 🚀
Honestly, the UI looked WAY better than I expected.
It had:
- smooth transitions
- clean dashboards
- a modern tech-style design
- beautifully designed standings cards
- proper page linking
Everything looked polished.
So polished, in fact, that I genuinely wanted to deploy it before the backend even existed 😭
I sat there admiring the preview for a while…
…and then reality hit.
Almost nothing actually worked.💀
I thought:
“No problem. Once I connect the backend, everything should work.”
Yeah… no
The Spreadsheet Nightmare 📊😭
The backend part of the project was honestly chaos.
The existing tournament spreadsheets were:
- poorly labeled
- inconsistent
- randomly formatted
- confusing to read
Human-made spreadsheets are terrifying sometimes 😭
But when in doubt…
Get the Claude out.
I used Claude Desktop and uploaded all the existing:
- score sheets
- team lists
- schedules
- tournament data
Then I asked it to reorganize everything properly into structured Excel files that could directly fit into my Supabase tables.
And somehow…
…it actually worked REALLY well.
After a little back and forth, the data was finally clean enough to import into the database.
Honestly, AI saved me HOURS here.
to
“Fixed the Issue” …Except It Didn’t 😭
At this point, I thought:
“Okay, database is ready. Surely the app works now.”
Nope.
The admin dashboard was completely broken 😅 Buttons existed.
They looked functional. They even had hover effects.
But clicking them did absolutely nothing 💀
Classic AI-generated functionality.
So I connected the project to:
- GitHub
- Vercel
Then I cloned the repo locally and brought in my most trusted debugging partner:
Claude Code.
And honestly, even Claude struggled a bit here 😭
It kept:
- “fixing” the issue
- correcting itself
- generating new fixes
- making me push code changes
…only for absolutely nothing to happen.
At one point it genuinely became:
“Trust me bro, this fix will work.” 😭
Eventually, I realized I needed to provide WAY more context and explain the issue more clearly instead of expecting AI to magically understand everything.
After narrowing things down properly…
…it turned out to be a package issue all along.🥲🙏
The Moment Everything Finally Worked ✨
After fixing the package issue, I pushed the changes to GitHub.
And within a minute…
everything started working.
It genuinely felt like a miracle 😭
- The standings updated correctly.
- The right teams had the right points.
- The fixtures displayed properly.
- The schedules synced correctly.
Everything was LIVE.
And the best part?
People actually started using it during the tournament 🏐
I shared the website in our volleyball group and received a lot of positive feedback, which honestly felt amazing.
At that moment, it felt like:
“Wait… I actually built something REAL.”
Meanwhile my friend, who was building his version on Lovable, could only get basic scoring functionality working 😎💪
So technically…
…I win.
This should probably be your climax image section.
What This Project Taught Me About AI Coding 🤖
This project completely changed how I look at AI-assisted development.
AI is genuinely an insanely powerful time-saving tool.
But…
AI only saves time if the developer knows how to guide it properly.
Things like:
- debugging knowledge
- context sharing
- proper prompting
- understanding systems
- identifying errors
…still matter A LOT.
Because the truth is:
AI can generate code quickly. But building a usable real-world app still requires developer thinking.
And honestly, I think that’s the most exciting part.
AI is not replacing developers.
It’s making developers faster 🚀
Final Thoughts
This project started as:
“Let’s see if AI can build us a cool website.”
But it ended up teaching me:
- backend integration
- debugging
- deployment
- database management
- AI prompting
- and how important developer guidance still is
And somehow…
what started as a random society seminar idea became a fully deployed tournament website people actually used 😅
Definitely one of the coolest projects I’ve worked on so far.
See you guys in the next one 🚀
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