Google’s Gemini 3 rolled out today and I got an email inviting me to try it. I clicked through and stared at the empty prompt box. What should I do? There’s an “I feel lucky” button and I clicked that and got a prompt to build some boring business app. But at least then I knew it wanted to build me something. I was at work so couldn’t spend a lot of time so just spewed out this prompt:

Build an app that I can use to track my gaming and that helps me to decide what to play next. It should also track what platform (PC, Xbox, Playstation) a game is on and should pick at least one Xbox and one PC app every day so I can earn Microsoft Rewards points. Once those conditions are met it should weight game choice based on how long it has been since I played that game (the longer it has been since I played, the more likely it gets picked). Also there should be a field for games with daily login rewards so I make sure to get those every day.

This is an interation on another (Python) app that I vibe-coded with ChatGPT. But I was just playing around, testing stuff.

I hit submit and then my boss pinged me on Teams so I switched over to my work desktop and, y’know, earned my salary. When I remembered the Gemini experience I went back and there it was, a fully fleshed out app that did pretty much what I wanted. I realized though that I need to differentiate between Xbox PC games and other PC games so I asked for a tweak:

I just realized I need TWO different PC categories. One is PC Xbox (games played through the Xbox App which qualify them for Microsoft Rewards) and one for all other PC games. Can we add that?

And off it went. Within a few minutes I had a pretty nice looking app:

The little blurb about the game is being pulled in automagically via AI; I didn’t ask for that, but I like it.

Now mind you I haven’t actually USED this yet but so far it looks like exactly what I wanted. I’ll tweak some of the colors (particularly the Playstation tag which needs to be a lighter blue) but it’s really close to EXACTLY what I want custom made for ME.

The downside is, where do I run this? For now I’m running it locally after failing to get it to run on Vercel, and during the troubleshooting for that I realized “before I put this anywhere public we’ll need to add an authentication layer and I’ll have to check the code for any security issues” both of which felt like more than I can take on right now. I’m actually glad I ran into Vercel issues because I hadn’t really thought through the ramifications of putting this online!

So to do: authentication, security check, find a place to host it (maybe just on this hosting account). Not finished yet, but it feels like a really good start!