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!