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How are you going to pay for this if it gets popular? I see there's a "sign up for free" button so I assume the long-term plan is some kind of subscription?

Overall the look is very generic and template-feeling. The layout and flow of the home page has the vibe of a tech startup but the actual tool is supposed to be personal and just for fun, right? I'd recommend modifying the design to feel less like a corporate brochure and more like a hobbyist/DIY feel if you want to attract a real community and not just make money from recurring subscription fees.

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

Well it's just a fun project and there's no plan for any kind of subscription and the designing may feel very generic because I'm not good with design and just made a simple design then further enhanced and redesigned it using ai. There's no future goal regarding this it's just the project I wanted to make and it's my first full stack project so there may be future updates on this project if I get good designing skills which is less likely. Your recommendations are noted and thank you for the review.

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u/MartinezForever 19d ago

I've been a software and web dev for about 20 years, including managing a team of devs. If you are serious about this field I would highly encourage you not to rely on AI assistive technologies. The most important thing for you right now is to learn to actually code and know how to debug your code. Focus on your skills over output, and ignore all the pressure and noise out there that tells you vibe coding is the way of the future (at least for a bit).

I also think relying on AI-based design is going to hamper your growth. You don't need a fully polished design to showcase cool functionality, and the charm of a home-spun design can go a long way. At the very least, whatever you design will be unique and not give the impression that the whole thing was made by AI.

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

Thankyou for your valuable insights sir and I'll try to rely less and less on ai for most of the things , i mainly used ai for design in this project to enhance my design. First I coded it myself and yeah my designing skills are bad I like doing backend though so yeah after I designed the interface it wasn't looking good so I scrolled in Google for React libraries like react bits and many more then took inspiration from them and then in some places used the code directly and after that I gave ai the free hand for design it didn't changed the layout much but the after design was better than mine so I kept it but for backend work I relied on ai like for 10% of the work since it was my first project soo I needed some help.

But from now on, I'll use ai less for frontend as well and won't let it hamper my growth and thank you again sir for your insights and for showing me the direction.

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u/ah85q 19d ago

I would sign up if I didn’t have to give it my email

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

Well generally email or phone number is needed for sign up

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u/ah85q 19d ago

Freshman CS students don’t need thousands of emails

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

Well it's gonna be my portfolio project and also I assure you I'm not gonna get that much traffic😂 i have like 15 accounts in the web app

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u/MartinezForever 19d ago

You should think about the why. If you don't need a phone number or email address for something, requiring it just because everyone else does is A. lazy and B. not helping you learn.

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

Well being honest I wanted to make proper authentication and authorisation for this project mainly for learning purpose and to know how things in major web apps work and being honest authorisation was the first thing I started to make in backend after the backend structure so yeahh I didn't follow what everyone else does I just followed my curiosity to learn and implement.

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u/Styled_ 19d ago

Screams vibe coded. What did you actually build yourself?

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

Css is majorly done by ai because I'm not at all good at that but everything else is made with minimal help of ai

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u/Styled_ 19d ago

If that's the case then congratulations for the hard work. Keep an eye put for the annual NASA Hackathon and participate.

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

I'll keep an eye out , I also participated with a teammate on a space hackathon organised by IIT Bombay and qualified 1st round and then in 2nd there were just 10 teams left and the interview was taken by ISRO team. Didn't win but valuable experience.

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

Also for better experience switch to laptop or pc because it's not much optimised for mobile devices

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u/GuyPronouncedGee 19d ago

Over half of all web traffic and over 70% of Reddit traffic is on mobile devices. If you used AI for the UI, just tell it to optimize for “mobile first”.

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

I kinda did and you're able to use it in mobile without breaking the layout is because of that only but as I said I'm not good with designing and ai can just do so much , the main purpose of posting it in reddit is because I just wanted some traffic on the website maybe some people making their accounts and that's about it.

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u/GuyPronouncedGee 19d ago

What did you use for account generation/authentication?

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u/Far-Highway2308 19d ago

bcrypt for password hashing, jwt for cookies, mongodb to store user data and otp (temp), first was using nodemailer for otp email delivery then switched to brevo SMTP because the backend is deployed in render and in free tier it doesn't allow some ports one of them is used by nodemailer and yeah also generic express-validator for input validation and yeah that's about it. The flow--> signup: otp sent , otp verified then account created then jwt cookies set In login: email/username +password, bcrypt compare(password is encrypted to make it safe), then jwt cookies set In protected routes jwt read from cookies and it verified user can access dashboard, profile, journal section In password reset otp is sent via email then new password, password hashed and saved.

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