I built the NYT Connections game (which I LOVE) as a native Android app using just my voice and GitHub Copilot - no code. Here is how I did it. 🧵 1/14

First I need a mobile app. I chose Flutter as it has an incredibly good extension for VS Code. Extension installs Flutter and emulators. Create a new project, choose an emulator, rock and roll. 2/14

Next step was to build the UI of the game. It's a clone of the NYT Connections game. Describing UI in prompts in tedious. It's a lot easier to just give copilot a screenshot of the UI you want. Yes. You can do that. 3/14

Now we start creating the game mechanics. The secret to this whole thing is moving slowly - one step at a time. Don't try to ask copilot to do multiple things in one prompt. First, we tell it how the user interacts with tiles. 4/14

Next we break the single main file up into components. Copilot does this - technically - but not in the way I had intended... 5/14

Next, I refactor to pull in the words, groups and colors from an API (JSON file). Again - copilot vision. It can create the games.json file from a screenshot of a completed game. This was the most 🤯 moment of the project for me. 6/14

Tell copilot to use the JSON file to load the game. Here I hit the limit of the "working set" for Edits. Had to remove some unused references. Copilot also tells how to load the static JSON file as an asset for Android so the app can read it. 7/14

Now we tell Copilot about the "win scenario". Or how to handle a correct guess. You can hear me get kind of excited right at the end of this video because I'm realizing that this is actually going to work. 8/14

Now we handle the "lose scenario". Here I ask for an animation - which I would consider an advanced task for me as a developer. And we run into our first major roadblock... 9/14

I just feed the stack trace right back in to Copilot. After all, I didn't write this, not my error. 😆 Turns out, Copilot forgot an import. Turns out AI is more like a real developer than I thought! Animation functional. 10/14

Turns out, Copilot implemented the "Shuffle" and "Deselect All" buttons somewhere along the way and I didn't even notice! 11/14

The last step is to get picky about pixels and do some refining. There's more to do in terms of creating the games, login, history, etc. But the game itself is fully functional. 12/14

A few things I used along the way... Copilot Vision Preview: Copilot Edits: Flutter Extension: 13/14

Complete video on YouTube... fin