Lessons from Building an AI App Builder on Convex

Building an AI app builder called Chef on the Convex platform provides several key lessons for developing agentic AI applications. The system's architecture relies on an opinionated template and an agent loop that allows an LLM to write, edit, and type-check code to fulfill user prompts. Key factors for success include providing good abstractions, programmatically preventing the LLM from making catastrophic errors, and leveraging a typesafe backend. The process highlights principles like limiting the LLM's decision space to prevent errors and using quantitative evaluations to define and measure successful outcomes.