Finished CS50x in January. Spent last 3.5 months turning my Final Project into a live AI app. My lower back hurts, but I received my portion of dopamine once it was live
Hey everyone,
I finished CS50x back in January, and instead of submitting a simple final project and moving on, I accidentally went down a pretty deep rabbit hole.
Not sure if it's good but I realized that I lose motivation fast if I'm not building something practical that people can actually use, so I spent last 3.5 months turning my final project into a real, live web app: https://app.cosplaycostume.info
The idea actually comes from my past, I'm also a content creator and a few years ago, I built a very manual Wordpress version of this concept where I’d pick characters like Tony Soprano and manually search for every clothing item in their outfit so people could recreate the look for Halloween.
This time, I wanted to build it properly as a developer.
What it does:
It helps people create outfits for cosplay, Halloween, or themed parties. Instead of giving generic text suggestions, the app generates 5 visual previews for costume ideas, and once you pick one, it connects to Amazon’s API to find matching items you can actually buy.
Since this is my first real full-stack app, the learning curve was pretty brutal. Along the way I had to learn how to:
- Connect external APIs and build fallback logic when products fail
- Build a relational database with caching + hashing systems to avoid wasting AI/API calls on duplicate prompts
- Handle AI prompt engineering with structured schemas
- Learned some great exercises for lower back pain 😅
It’s definitely not perfect yet:
- The AI sometimes gets WAY too creative
- Loading is SLOW while the backend processes requests and generates images
- I’m not yet eligible for Amazon Creator API direct item links (not enough sales), so right now there’s only a fallback system that redirects to matching search result pages instead.
But honestly, even though I’m exhausted and probably need a small break from this project, seeing something I built from scratch finally go live feels amazing, it reminds me that dopamine boost from solving those first C problem sets during CS50.
Would genuinely love feedback from you guys.
And if you try it, please share the weirdest costume idea previews it generates 😂
I’m really thankful to David Malan and the whole CS50 team for making such a great course! It really brought back my interest in CS after I thought 'it’s not for me' during a boring university course!