Live
Braindex
One puzzle a day on the language of AI. Twenty sections, 1,645 questions, and a seventeen-day run from an empty repo to App Store review.
What it is
Braindex is a daily game about the vocabulary of AI, the words that get used constantly and understood loosely. One short round a day, twenty sections, 1,645 questions behind it. The format is borrowed: a small daily loop you finish in two minutes and come back to tomorrow.
How it was built
Flutter and Dart for one codebase across iOS and Android. Firebase for the entire backend -- auth, Firestore, analytics, security rules. Gemini generated the question bank across the twenty sections. Claude Code in VS Code did the pair-programming on Dart and worked through every hurdle along the way. Lovable got used twice: once to prototype the flow before opening the editor, once to scaffold the marketing site.
Then the unglamorous half: Xcode signing and provisioning, Transporter for the IPA upload, App Store Connect and Google Play Console, Vercel hosting the site, GoDaddy holding the domain. Seventeen days, fifty commits, one person.
What it taught me
The speed wasn’t discipline. It was the stack. A single person can now carry an idea to two app stores in under three weeks, and almost none of that time goes on the thing you’d expect -- writing the app. It goes on signing, provisioning, store listings, and the admin nobody warns you about.
The second build shipped in roughly half the time the first one did. That is the argument for building the first one.