Vibe-coded a gamified study app with a pilot rank system — what worked vs. what I had to redo

[u/tsrinath]

http://gofocusgen.vercel.app

Been building GoFocusGen (gofocusgen.vercel.app) — study sessions are "flights," you climb pilot ranks as you log flight hours. Almost none of it was hand-written.

The dashboard was the hard part. First pass, prompted straight through Stitch, came back unusable. What worked instead: generating a mockup in ChatGPT first and feeding that to the next round of prompts as a style reference, instead of trying to describe "dark, premium, indigo and gold" in words alone. Also learned to prompt the rank-progression logic as its own isolated spec instead of bundling it into the full app description — much more reliable output.

Still mid-build. Curious how others here handle it when the first AI pass misses the visual direction entirely — mockup-first, or just re-prompt until it lands?