Here’s my goal. I want to see how many hours it’ll take to build a debt calculator using AI. With Svelte. I’m going to be using JetBrains AI. I’m hoping it only takes a couple of hours, but I’ve actually been trying a lot lately to get this done with a few smart prompts and it has not gone well.

Let’s begin.

Step 1: Create a repo

Ah, it looks like I attempted to do this a while ago, but didn’t get it complete. So I’m just going to start over. Here’s a link if you’re looking for the repo.

Step 2: Create a base svelte app

npx sv create debt_suggestion

I’m just going to replace the app that’s already there at this point.

cd debt_suggestion
yarn install
git checkout -b main
git remote add origin https://github.com/iwnnay/debt_suggestion
git push -u -f origin main

Step 3: Prompt the AI with the initial idea

I just created a base application with Svelte where I want to see a Debt Calculator application.
It should all be a single page application with TypeScript.

Features:
- One can add a credit card with a minimum payment, an APR, and a date when a Zero percent APR promotion ends
- One can enter a loan with an APR
- One can enter as many debt items as they want
- The app will then calculate the order for which they should be paid off
- A person can select to snowball payments, that's where the minimum payment is applied to the next available debt.
- There will be an additional payment section so that an additional pay ment amount can be added every month
- There will be an ammoritization schedule to show when the debts will be paid off, how much interest will be paid
- The ammoritization schedule will be live based on values entered 

If you want to see the result they are in commit 3bbf6a80a53767a8bfbd09e436c09f440f585d07

It’s not bad, but it’s filled with dummy data, which is more annoying than helpful.

And we’re at the hour mark. I did have a few distractions, the dogs wanted to play and be let out, but that’s late night coding for you.

Step 4: Bugs and improvements

I noticed a couple of things that didn’t work and the initial state of the app means that I now have to delete my debt list since there is no “Update” feature. That’s annoying.

Some things to fix.

Bugs:
The add button does not work
The remove button does not work
The payoff settings do not automatically update anything, or are not working.

I got some code changes out of this at commit cf208e12bfb39ac72abe6c43efc3b956b6a0a087, but it didn’t fix anything. I still can’t interact with the page. I’m going to have to dig into the code and see why I can’t do anything.

One Hour, 24 minutes Digging into the code.

End of Day 1

Not a lot of progress today. I do have templates and a single page app with well defined components. Appart from that, nothing is working and the ammoritization schedule appears to neglect miniumum payments done on months for subsequent focused debts. This is a problem.