Hey everyone,
I wanted to share an idea that could make our development process so much smoother. Right now, whenever we start a new project—be it an app, a game, or something else—we’re essentially starting from scratch every time. It’s frustrating and wastes so much time just getting to a functional starting point.
What if we created and shared a library of ready-to-use templates? Imagine logging in, selecting what you want to create—like a game, app, article, or even a blog—and choosing from a variety of templates to get started instantly. These templates could include:
- Fully functioning setups for full-stack apps (e.g., MERN stack, Laravel + SQL).
- Frontend projects with frameworks like React, Vue, or a simple HTML5 boilerplate.
- Game templates with basic mechanics or engines ready to customize.
- Backend API setups pre-configured for common use cases.
New Feature Ideas
- Template Selection: A user-friendly interface where you can select the type of project you want to create. For example:
- Game: Choose a 2D or 3D game template with starter mechanics.
- App: Select a template for a web or mobile app.
- Article or Blog: Start with a content-rich layout and easy publishing tools.
- Local Hosting with LLM Support:
- Host full-stack apps locally just as easily as using XAMPP.
- Include database setup (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL) and connection ready to go.
- Enable integration with a locally running LLM (Large Language Model) for applications that require AI functionality, such as chatbots or content generation.
How This Helps
- Save Time: No more repetitive setups—we can start building right away.
- Boost Creativity: With the basics handled, we can focus on making innovative and unique projects.
- Collaborate Better: Sharing templates allows everyone to learn and improve from each other’s work.
What do you think? Would you find this helpful, or would you be interested in contributing templates? Let’s create a resource that helps everyone move faster and build better.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas!
7 Likes
I agree, wherever possible I would like the AI to use a starting template. It’s particularly bad at starting from scratch but proves to better at adding to it, especially if tasks are broken down. Only problem is a lot of templates have options that the AI also fails at too. Would be nice to improve this, but I also think the AI should be able to determine context in the prompt and figure out what “template” to use.
Likely this could be fixed by using a reasoning model like QwQ first to provide context, determine the template, maybe browse the web or npm, and refine the system prompt (basically a simple reasoning RAG). But there’s a lot to do before we get there.
But I disagree with the local hosting. Should definitely make it easy to deploy apps, maybe collaborate on projects (but that could be done through GitHub), but your average user should not be hosting things to the outside world without some safeguards in place. And that’s a lot of potential issues to support (across platforms, versions, moving parts, etc.).
And as a note, there are already a lot of templates available, we should confirm before recreating the wheel, and use them when available.
2 Likes
I’ve had much better luck starting from scratch. Seems like getting the AI to change direction is a huge ask in my experience.
1 Like
Do you mean better luck than using a standard template like Tailwind, Vite, or something… Or importing say a GitHub project?
Because the later has many problems when importing files or from GitHub or directory in my experience.
But I have had much better luck cleanly importing GitHub projects from the terminal, using my own git wrapper. The GUI import option just seems to cause issues…
1 Like
I just mean that once a project is significantly underway, I’ve had great difficulty getting the AI to make substantive changes or fixes, and I often end up starting over and being more careful to ask for the implementation of one narrowly defined feature or element at a time.
I know I’m applying human characteristics where I should not, but these coding AIs feel very STUBBORN to me, lol.
For example, I had a working auth system, decided to add a DisplayName field to the signup form, and I bet I went through 10MM tokens trying to get it to do that. And it never did! This kind of thing has given me a poor outlook on the idea of starting with a template and then customizing.
In reality, it’s not a problem with templates or customization. It’s simply the current state of AI. It can feel like a master genius one moment, and a confused kindergartener the next.
1 Like
Please check Phaser js, Construct 3 or even Buildbox.
These comes with pre-built game templates which user can start a pre-built game template with a specific genre.
We can feed Bolt.diy with templates, for users to choose from (Games, web apps, designs, etc.)
Also it would be cool to add start rating and download count like Github. A lot of efford I know but just the idea that I had in mind
1 Like
can you please provide the urls for the three sources and screenshot of what you mean in Github?