Author’s Note: Because I’m building out live, I’m experiencing some hiccups around my DNS/SSL. I’m including the lovable app link. Also there is an issue with SSL for the the original site, so it will say it is insecure. I’m accepting everything isn’t perfect.
WYSIWIL stands for What You See is What I’d Like. It’s a family wish list app. You add things you want, other people can see them and claim them so nobody buys the same thing twice, and everybody stops asking “what do you want” via eleven separate group texts. My family has used it for 25 years. I built it. My daughter describes it as “backend developer UI” aesthetic. I’ve wanted to modernize it for ages. I never had the time.
Here is what “looked like something built 25 years ago” actually means. I am hosting a copy at http://theoriginal.wysiwil.net. If you want to log in, use lovablediaries@theoriginal.wysiwil.net. Currently no new accounts can be created here.
Then a few things happened at once.
A couple months back at work, I was planning to build a reporting story in Power BI. I was out of the office. JM took it over and built it with Aspire and AI instead. What he had by the time I got back was faster and better than what I would have built. That stuck with me. Not “I should learn Aspire.” More like: what else has changed while I wasn’t looking.
I hadn’t touched hands-on web development in fifteen years. So I made a plan, the way I always make a plan. Full scope. WYSIWIL as a phone app, feature list, stages, five hours of working through it with my AI collaborator. It was a good plan.
Then I went and played with something else entirely. A simple Lovable form to collect questions for a t-shirt giveaway. Nothing to do with WYSIWIL. But building that tiny form taught me more about what these tools could actually do than the five hours of planning had.
That’s when the real idea showed up. Use the WYSIWIL rebuild as the way I learn the current landscape, not just as a rebuild I already knew how to do. Scale back from phone app to website. Smaller scope, but I could start today instead of someday.
I also tried IdeaGrit along the way, a tool that tells you whether an idea is worth building for sale. It told me mine wasn’t. Not every tool earns a place in the stack, and not every idea earns a place either. That’s fine. It’s data, not a detour.
The new site is live at wysiwil.net (using what-you-see-is-what-i-like.lovable.app due to SSL issues). It is also still very much under construction, in the sense that a house with no roof and one working light switch is under construction. Look around. Don’t lean on anything. But you can create your own account and play along this week.
So here’s where I landed. Six tools, all of them new to me, each one doing a specific job:
Lovable - the AI-assisted builder doing the actual construction. This is where the app takes shape.
Supabase - the database backend. Where the data actually lives.
Codecov - test coverage visibility. Because I want to know what’s actually tested, not just hope.
Resend - email infrastructure. Sending things reliably is its own small discipline.
PostHog - telemetry and analytics. If I don’t know how people use it, I’m guessing.
Playwright - end to end testing. Making sure the thing works the way I think it works, not just the way I hope it does.
Additionally, I am leveraging GitHub Issues. I've used Issues plenty over the years, but never quite this way. I added a feedback button to the website and hooked it up to file issues automatically. Something breaks, or a reader flags a problem, and the issue shows up in the repo on its own. Fixes get driven the same way everything else does here.
Each one of these is going to get its own essay in this series. What I learned, what surprised me, what broke, what “boring is a feature” looked like in practice.
The plan didn’t get me moving. The playing did. And I’m doing scary to me by publishing while it’s still raw.
Alison + The Inner Chamber
This is such a cool app idea. It's amazing that you have been using it for 25 years. I am the one who collects all these lists in my house. My daughter even asked me last week if she could get lists for my husband and me, so she knows what to buy us for birthdays and Christmas as she is getting older.