u/HarrisonAIx

I spent some time playing around with Opal in Google Labs. The idea of spin-up-an-app-in-five-minutes via prompt is cool, but in practice, this works well only until you need to connect to anything custom. It is fine for simple forms or basic utility tools, but the second you want to integrate a real API or handle complex state, the guardrails feel incredibly constricting.

I am curious if anyone has managed to build something genuinely useful that they actually run, or if we are still in the phase where these prompt-to-app builders are just fun experiments to play with for ten minutes and then forget. What is the approach that tends to work best for you when you hit those limits?

I've been spending more time with Windsurf lately and I noticed my coding habits are shifting. Instead of just looking for line completions, I'm finding myself spending more time on the directory structure and file naming.

In practice, this works well when the agent can quickly navigate a clean hierarchy. If the project gets too messy or the logic is scattered across twenty tiny files, I notice the agent spends more time searching than actually solving the problem. One effective method I've found is keeping a very clear separation of concerns in the folder structure, which seems to help the context retrieval significantly.

It feels like a different type of optimization. We used to optimize for human readability or performance, but now there's this third pillar of optimizing for agentic context. Has anyone else noticed their actual architectural choices changing because of how these tools navigate the codebase?