Devlog #4: Moving to ttkbootstrap + adding a “Build this!“button

Heyyyy! I was gonna write this devlog yesterday, but it was getting kinda late, so I decided to do it toady.

So here’s what’s new: First of all, I switched the app over from plain tkinter widgets to ttkbootstrap, to basically just make things easier. Before, the “Generate ideas!” button was just a label pretending to be a button, with custom hover colors and click bindings, because MacOS (my operating system) was applying an ugly outdated gray/silverish button with no styling, and I wasn’t able to change it.

The switch was relatively smooth, since for most commands, I just had to change the prefix from tk. to tb. Only problem was that these new widgets don’t take bg=/fg= like my previous ones did, so I had to define named styled in the beginning instead. I also added a difficulty field in the beginning, so the user can control the difficulty level of the project ideas, and also a progress bar along with the cycling messages, so the user actually knows when the Ai is thinking.

I also gave each card a “Build this! button, which once pressed, sends another prompt to the ai asking for a full guide, including components, wiring, build instructions, and code if needed. I ran into some errors along the way, mostly typos, which I debugged with the help of Ai.

Next time I’ll give the build guide it’s own screen instead of sitting underneath the entry fields, and make the colors of the app consistent between all the screens. That’s it for now, see you on the next devlog!

Devlog #3: Displaying each idea in it’s own dedicated card

Hey there! Today, I switched from dumping all he project ideas the AI gave me into one big ScrolledText box, since just a wall of text with no specific layout or format isn’t excactly great user experience.

The main thing I changed, was swapping the text box with a scrollable list of widgets (boxes), with each widget having its own colored background, border, a Label for the project name, one for the description and the extra components and lastly one for the time and cost to make.

Since tkinter frames don’t scroll by default, I had to create a seperate canvas with a scrollbar bound to it and the cards embedded inside it. Because cards are real widgets now instead of just plain text you can use .delete(), when the user clicked the button again to regenerate ideas, it also had to clean up the previous cards before drawing the new ones, since otherwise all the ideas would just pile up one after the other.

I ran into quite some bugs along the way, such as small syntax errors and typos, which I used AI to help me debug.

Next time I’ll probably add some buttons for each card, such as a “copy idea” or a “build this one” button. That’s it for now, see you on the next devlog!

Devlog #2: Transferring project to tkinter!

Today I moved the project from a terminal-based script to an actual GUI using the tkinter library, since typing into input() prompts and just reading a wall of terminal text isn’t exactly a great user experience.

The main structure translated pretty easily: text boxes (entry widgets) for components, hours and budget, a “Generate Ideas!” button and an output area for the results.

The most difficult part was keeping the window responsive: calling the AI API directly would freeze the whole window until the response came back, so the request now runs in the background, with the result handed back to the main thread safely using root.after().

I used the same rotating status messages from the terminal version (“Brainstorming…”, “Thinking”, etc.), which now update live in the GUI while it waits.

Because this was my first time using tkinter, I used Claude to get me up to speed with the core concepts (widgets, entries, `.pack(), etc.). Once I wrote the code, I also used it to help me debug it.

Next time I’m probably gonna make the ai output structures json so I can display each project idea in it’s own “card”, and generally work in making the GUI look prettier. That’s it for today, see you on the next devlog!

Devlog #1: Coding MVP

Hey there! First devlog for this project! So the idea of this project is that you write what components you have, how much time you can devote and what your budget is, and AI brainstorms 5 different project ideas you can make that fit those criteria.

The project is coded in Python. First, I generated a new API key from HackAi to use as the brain, and integrated it. Then I wrote 1 master prompt which gets sent to the AI every time and includes the info the user has given (components, time available, budget), along with instructions on what format to return each idea in (name, description, extra components needed, cost, and time estimate).

I used the rich library to make the terminal output look prettier: rendering the AI’s response as formatted markdown instead of plain text, adding colors and even a colored spinner along with some phrases (such as thinking..., brainstorming..., ect.) so the user knows somethings is happening instead of just guessing if the program has frozen or not.

Next up: I’ll probably switch to Tkinter to give it an actual GUI instead of a terminal prompt. Probably gonna have text boxes for components/time/budget, a “Generate Ideas” button, and each idea shown in its own card instead of one long markdown dump.

Follow along to see how it turns out!