Building With AI: Why Structuring an App Idea Takes 20+ Prompts

Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with AI app builders. They’re impressive — you can generate working code, screens, and even deployable apps from prompts. But while testing different builders, I kept running into the same frustrating pattern. The hardest part wasn’t building the app. It was structuring the idea. The Prompt Problem Before an AI builder can generate something useful, the idea usually needs to be broken down into clear pieces like: • features • screen flow • database tables • API endpoints • tech stack Without that structure, the outputs tend to become messy or inconsistent. So the workflow often looks like this: Prompt 1 “Build an AI dog training app” Prompt 2 “Add login and user accounts” Prompt 3 “Create a database schema” Prompt 4 “Add reminders and notifications” Prompt 5 “Create a dashboard” Prompt 6 “Add dog profiles” And before long you're 10–20 prompts deep just trying to get the structure right. The Experiment To explore this problem, we built a