I've been reflecting a bit on this and remembering what it used to be like when I did hackathons regularly a decade or so ago. This project seems on-par with the type of 48 hour hackathon project I used to do (assuming CLIP had existed), but now I was able to do it in 2 hours instead of 48.

I can't imagine someone non-technical building something like this with prompting. The success of the project was highly dependent on my direction of the model to do what I wanted it to do (even though I gave it leeway in exactly how to do it). It did feel a bit like managing another engineer to do something vs doing it myself.

I don't use agents like this in my day to day work yet (I experimented with OpenHands a couple of months ago but it was frustrating, expensive, and took just as long as doing the task myself). But I'm thinking I probably will be a year from now.

A few times when the model got stuck I copy/pasted some stuff into o1 and pasted its response back into v0 (felt kind of like "escalating" to a more senior engineer) and that helped it get unstuck. Future models will be even more capable than o1. I imagine there will likely need to be a UI for "bringing in the big guns" of a smarter model in the future even if the grunt-work is done by a fast+cheap base model.

There's probably also something to letting the model "speak its native tongue". I don't know next.js but letting the model work with patterns it's been trained on probably helped it be more effective (compared to having OpenHands work in my own codebase using a structure it's unfamiliar with).