One-Shot AI

I've been fascinated watching the "vibe coding" trend. People are creating surprisingly impressive games and apps that are entirely written by AI prompting tools like Cursor and Windsurf. For example, @levelsio built a full flight simulator complete with multiplayer, ads, etc:

Meanwhile, I've also gotten into what I call "one-shotting"—creating applications with a single, well-crafted AI prompt.

The Problem

Here's the specific problem I faced that was perfectly solved in one-shot. I like posting to Hacker News but it takes some time and sometimes people will scoop me. I'll find an article, go to share it, and feel an unwanted jolt of adrenaline if I was the first to post. This just happened with this Sam Altman blog post:

How I Solved This With a Single AI Prompt

I decided to build a Chrome extension that would:

• Show an orange icon when viewing a page not recently submitted to HN
• Display a gray icon for pages already submitted
• Allow single-click submission for new content
• Take users directly to existing discussions for previously posted content

I turned to o1 (a more powerful LLM that uses "chain of thought") on ChatGPT with this prompt:

You are an expert web and Chrome extension developer. Write a simple Chrome extension called "HN Ready" with a logo that has the letters "HN" when pinned. It should run in every page in Chrome and do the following:
- Check if the current webpage has been posted on Hacker News in the past 6mo and received more than 5 upvotes using Algolia (https://hn.algolia.com/)
- If so, then the "HN" icon should be gray
- If not, then the "HN" icon should be orange
- If it's orange, then I should be able to click the icon and it should pop open https://news.ycombinator.com/submit in a new tab
- That form should be pre-filled with the article's title and URL
- If it's gray, then take me to the HN discussion page

The Results

ChatGPT generated all the necessary files and provided clear installation instructions for a local Chrome extension. The extension queries the Hacker News Algolia API whenever you load a page to check if it's been recently shared. It then changes color based on what it finds. Super simple but solves the problem.

The only challenge was creating the icon images, which I handled using Pixelmator. The Chrome extension wasn't working because it didn't have the orange and gray icons at the right pixel sizes. In retrospect, I could have simplified this by requesting SVG icons in my initial prompt.

What This Means for Developers

This project shows how AI tools are transforming development. When given clear context about a problem, they can generate solutions that actually work. This works best when the problem is well-defined and there's a small number of files and lines of code to solve it.

One-shotting represents a significant shift in how we approach development—from writing code line by line to articulating problems clearly and leveraging AI to handle implementation details.

The barrier between idea and implementation is shrinking dramatically. AI models will tackle increasingly complex problems. Reasoning capabilities will also let them handle longer-term planning. For example, they'll build the scaffolding of a project, start to implement a specific feature, realize they'll need to change the overall structure, etc. They'll also increasingly be able to autonomously run and test the code they generate.

Built anything interesting with a single prompt? Reach out at @gwintrob.