1,250 Commits and a Failed Hackathon Led to an Advanced AI PRD Generator

I built initrepo out of my own frustrations. AI coding assistants are powerful, but with lack of project context.. you will end up with failing, duplicate, dead and bloated code. Making the necessary context or chaining together perfect prompts is a massive chore.. and can sometimes slow down the exciting journey of having AI write the code for you.

I developed a system that helped me write PRDs, Technical Specs, Design, User stories / epics and Task lists all in markdown format for my AI coding tools. It was a manual process using Gemini gems with specific personas, instructions and output formats.. then I would copy and paste the output and organizing everything into my new project GitHub.

I was getting ready for a hackathon, making several different projects to give a try for entry.. I spent a week making the docs.. each project took anywhere from a few hours to one taking 10 hours to create all the docs. The night before the hackathon started.. it hit me. I knew my system needed to be my next project.. and I began the journey to bring it to life.

The first step for any project.. to initialize a repo and start planning.. and initrepo.com was born.

I ended up missing the deadline for the hackathon.. I had over 1250 commits.. and the core workflow was still throwing errors on the last step!!! I threw in the towel, and started over.. that Hackathon was ending in 6 hours.

I missed the deadline.. but I'm perfectly okay with that. I learned a lot along the way, and a valuable lesson re hashed.. keep it simple..

I tried over engineering it.. I was planning to have everything live in the google cloud ecosystem.. a app for consumers, and another for businesses that wanted API & White labeling features. I threw it all away and started over.. re worked my process to just give me the basics, and initrepo was live in 4 days.. officially having users a week later from organic google search and a LinkedIn shoutout from a complete stranger.

I've been moving so fast I forgot that I decided to launch on peerlist.io!!! And I'm surprised it even got to 25 upvotes, its amazing to me. Initrepo only has a handful of active users, so it probably wasn't the right time to launch on a platform like this.. but I'm okay with that too.. I'm am brand new to this world, and enjoying every moment.

Initrepo has become my go to project, I wake up excited to work on it.. I am adding new features and polishing those up every day.. It wont always work 100% of the time, but that's okay with me as well. I still need to setup a traditional CI/CD pipeline with a staging environment so I don't cause downtime lol.. I'll get on it!

If you made it this far in the story, consider giving initrepo an upvote :)

I really appreciate all the support and I'll check back in soon to give updates on the progress I make regularly - so give a follow as well!