Around August last year, if I recall correctly, we were asked to come up with a breakthrough or innovation for the WBBM (Wilayah Birokrasi Bebas dan Melayani) assessment. At that time, I volunteered to help build a guestbook application.
This was because nobody knew how to update the existing guestbook app whenever there were changes to Taxpayers, employee shifts, and so on.
That’s why I stepped up to create a brand-new guestbook app using the PHP programming language.
Why PHP? Well, it just so happened that the PC acting as the app host had low RAM, an old-generation Core i3 CPU, and used XAMPP as its platform.
Long story short, in September, I tried building it from scratch with the help of AI, thinking to myself: just keep it simple and use a framework for the UI.
After some research, I chose a dashboard template from adminlte.io, which is based on Bootstrap and jQuery. Yeah, Bootstrap and jQuery might be a bit outdated, but whatever, the main goal was just to get it done without overthinking the tech for this app.
The main concept for the guestbook app was that after a Taxpayer registers as a guest, an automated WhatsApp message would be sent to the intended employee and their supervisor.
At that time, I used a WA gateway service from onesender.net which was cheap, only 150k IDR a year.
In the early stages of building the app, I got help from Gemini for brainstorming, and when I started coding, I used Deepseek v3, later updating to v3.2.
Deepseek’s AI was quite helpful, but it made mistakes way too often. In the end, I had to fix the app myself, or when I hit a wall on certain parts, I asked Claude Sonnet for help via OpenRouter.
Back then, I was still building the app using VSCode and Cline. Using Cline and VSCode really opened my eyes to AI-assisted app development.
It taught me how to write prompts, how to handle the AI when it hallucinates, that we have to work phase-by-phase, and so on.
In the first 3 months, there were a lot of issues, especially with the inconsistent look and feel between pages, both in terms of UI and UX.
A few times, I ended up asking Claude Sonnet just to standardize the UI and UX across all pages.
Entering the new year, the development stalled due to my busy schedule and a side project. Even though it was right around the time the app was supposed to launch, there were still many things to consider, especially security issues.
Also, the computer provided for the guestbook couldn’t connect to the internet, so as a result, we couldn’t send WA messages to the intended employees.
So, it was put on hold until we could find a way out. The solution that came to mind at the time was: what if we just make the app entirely online?