Firebase Studio

I built a complete working application (errortexts.com) using an AI tool, so I have a little insight on this.

At first, the product I was using (lovable.dev) seemed to me exactly as you described. I gave it a basic app outline and hit run, and it produced something that superficially looked right but did nothing.

So I asked some other people for advice, and they said you have to hold its hand and go step by step. So I did.

I told it, give me a landing page that matches [product description], but implement nothing else. Then, ok, let's set up auth - add a sign in and sign up dialog. Then, ok, let's create a user account page. Bit by bit.

It succeeded wildly. I was able to build the whole thing in 3 days. I'm not capable of that on my own, it would have taken me 3 weeks. Sometimes the AI got stuck and I had to manually go in and accomplish what I wanted. It took over 100 steps to complete the product, and probably around 10-20 times I had to revert its changes and give it more specific instructions. I had to check its work at every iteration, just like with a junior developer.

But it worked. And it's going to get better. Would I use this for "something important"? Depends how you define that. I used it to build a working product. Would I start letting it modify an existing mature codebase willy-nilly? No, probably not. Would I let it write cryptographic logic or trust that it wrote bulletproof code from a security standpoint in a sensitive context? No.

But for a simple application, it was an incredibly powerful tool. Especially for something that didn't even exist just 2 years ago. Give this a decade and it's going to change all our careers even more than it already has.

I put your prompt into the vibe coding tool I'm working on (shameless plug).

The first version[0] looked good, but when I inspected it I found that it just picked an I Ching prediction at random on the back-end, instead of actually flipping coins.

I updated the prompt to the following:

> Create app where you input a question, then flip coins to generate an I Ching prediction (client-side). First show the standard I Ching prediction and it's hexagram, and then use AI to generate a fortune analysis based on the prediction and your initial question.

And the result was much more laborious[1] of a UI :shrug:

[0]https://iching.magicloops.app

[1]https://iching2.magicloops.app

[ I work on Dart at Google. ]

The app prototyping logic in Firebase Studio isn't wired up for Flutter/Dart yet. You can play with Gemini+Dart/Flutter here: https://dartpad.dev/?channel=main.

We're working with the Firebase Studio team to integrate. FWIW, it seems to do fairly well with "Create a chess clock app".

[Full disclosure, work @ Firebase]

But try this:

Open up a blank Flutter template in Studio: https://studio.firebase.google.com/new/flutter

After everything initializes and your Android and web previews set up, open chat by clicking the little Gemini spark at the bottom of the workspace and then add your prompt.

YMMV, but I got a very basic, but working chess clock in one shot with "Can you replace this sample Flutter project with a fully-functional chess clock that works on Android and on the web?"

I built exactly this in less than a day using Windsurf.

Come up with your data model, explain it to the AI, and tell it to give you a CRUD for it.

I'm pretty sure it's perfectly doable to ask it to give you a dynamic crud based on the "shape" of the data in Firestore.

Sadly it's an internal tool for work, so I can't share.

That’s actually a good prompt

For me the biggest missing block is the text search API. It's ridiculous that you can't add a basic search input to your Firebase-based website unless you use TypeSense, Algolia or some other additional database that you have to manage and keep in sync.

Despite all the recent enshitification, I can't think of any alternative solution that would come even close to what Firebase has to offer. Authentication API is especially hard to beat (cheap and very easy to integrate).

Check out fuegoapp.dev — it comes with a bunch of handy tools to manage Firestore and Firebase users

Have you tried Rowy.io?

I’ve enjoyed firefoo for this

I was under the impression that idx was formerly just the editor, but I guess that's changed.

That's one use case where LLMs really help me, one-off scripts where I know exactly what I need done, know it's possible but would take me much longer to brush off my Bash, Python, etc. skills to write it. Give the LLM a prompt, let it write the scaffolding, do the tweaks I need, and iterate over with the LLM if I forgot how exactly it was to write a for-loop in Bash.

5 years working at startups has taught me that go-to-market is almost always the most important function. There are very few truly novel spaces and apps. You can clone whatever you want, but you'll get nowhere without a solid GTM.

Let's go brrrr! I always wondered how the end of yc would look like.

Here's a dev.nix file that works for FastHTML, which is a little tricky to get the preview working but using this dev.nix it works out of the box. Would probably work with any Starlette or Uvicorn based app as well (obviously make sure you have requirements.txt in order).

https://community.firebasestudio.dev/t/working-fasthtml-a-ne...

How was your experience? Would it compare to Cursor, Windsurf, Cline/Roo?

> I do most of my vibe coding on my phone, so that's pretty disappointing

Curious what kind of phone apps you’ve been using to do vibe coding, I suppose it auto deploys stuff also?

They're trying to get in on the AI IDE / AI coding land rush so they don't have to acquire one of the leaders later. Or get blocked from acquiring one for antitrust reasons. Winning a chunk of this space feels like a major chess move that enables a lot of market optionality.

Google and Microsoft both have web IDEs, so it's a natural product evolution for these (though Microsoft's Github is much better positioned with its deep distribution and integrations).

It still feels like these are so far behind Cursor and Zed and the like in terms of getting real work done, but maybe the customer is new or non-engineers.

I haven't looked at startups like Replit. Are they even in this game?

And then there are the end-to-end products like Vercel's V0, Lovable, Bolt, etc. If they can get past the 80% problem, they might be a huge deal.

This is going to be quite the battle.

It's also literally named a product that has historical meaning in the developer community.

And which one this overlaps?

you've got nothing to worry about here.

if firebase studio can make a todo app, i'd be surprised. this is the worst "vibe coding" tool i've ever used.

It is free. though it takes your data for future training.

https://firebase.google.com/docs/gemini-in-firebase#:~:text=...