The Magic
Three years ago (spring 2023), I created my first program using AI — it was an overwhelming moment!
AI only goes so far
Since then, I’ve generated hundreds of scripts with AI. But as you can probably guess, they mostly remained just scripts. I never managed to implement more complex applications. As soon as the code grew larger, errors started piling up — and every bug fix led to new problems.
Pretty quickly, I came to the conclusion that AI could only reliably build small pieces of code. If someone wanted to build larger applications with AI, they would first need a solid and reliable framework that could assign small, specific tasks to the AI.
Until recently, I hadn’t found such a framework.
And then came Base44
In mid-March this year, everything fundamentally changed for me: I stumbled upon Base44.
I was greeted with a simple prompt window and asked to define an app. No need to ask me twice:
After about a minute, the app was ready. And after a few iterations, it had reached a stage where my entire family could use it:
That was the first time since the birth of ChatGPT that I was able to build a real app using AI 😁
What’s new here?
My IT colleagues don’t find this particularly special. I often hear:
“Claude Code builds you a shopping app in 10 seconds.”
But when I ask whether that app also includes backend, user management, and payment, the answers tend to get quieter.
In my view, this has been the missing piece. We could generate every aspect of an app — but never bring all components together.
Why is Base44 special?
Base44 covers all aspects of a modern application. The user only needs to focus on defining features.
The following aspects are covered by default:
- Frontend
- Backend
- User management
- Database
- Integration of external services
- Payment
- Hosting
- Deployment to app stores (Apple and Google)
That’s what makes the solution so compelling. As an app creator, you only focus on functionality — Base44 takes care of the rest.
How did Base44 come about?
Maor Shlomo wanted to build an app for his girlfriend. Instead of taking the easy route, he decided to create a framework that would allow her to build the app herself.
That’s how Base44 was born. Six months later, in addition to his girlfriend, he had 400,000 other app creators on the platform. Shortly after, Base44 was acquired by Wix.com for $80 million.
Maor is still actively involved in developing Base44. In an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast,” he shares his origin story:
One more thing…
In the past four weeks, I’ve built six apps that I continuously improve and use in my daily life.
One of them is a nutrition app called “Macro Master.” It allows me to input the nutritional values of my meals to ensure my diet is balanced:
However, entering all the nutritional data is tedious — I’d much prefer to have AI estimate it.
While walking our dog, I thought about how to best implement this. The obvious idea was integrating the ChatGPT API — doable, but cumbersome.
Then I had another thought: since Base44 is largely built on AI, wouldn’t it be great if Base44 apps had access to an LLM?
I pulled out my phone to check — and indeed, all Base44 apps have native access to an LLM!
As soon as I got home, I added the feature to my app. Since then, the tedious meal tracking has been reduced to two clicks and delegated to AI:
Conclusion
I’ve always dreamed of being able to build apps based on my ideas. Unfortunately, it used to be a very time-consuming and complex process. With frameworks like Base44, I can now bring my ideas to life in no time. For me, this is a dream come true.
After four weeks with Base44, here are my key learnings:
- Ideas can be quickly turned into something concrete
- Apps can be adapted very quickly
- Usability reaches a high level very fast
- The barriers to software development (cost and time) are no longer a factor
- So where are the new barriers? Probably in marketing…
- Processes and concepts can be validated through apps
- I was able to validate some ideas or reveal their weaknesses by building apps that made them tangible
From my perspective, Base44 is a milestone in software engineering — comparable to the impact of DOOM or the breakthrough of ChatGPT.
Simply next level 😊!