From a Personal Side Project to a Business: My Experience Building a Messenger with AI
Some time ago, I decided to build a messenger for myself and my friends—something independent. I have more than 20 years of experience in software development. At the same time, I decided to test AI as a development technology.
I chose the architecture, planned everything, prepared the prompts, and started working with ChatGPT Codex. Within a month, I had built a product that fully replicated the functionality of WhatsApp and Telegram. It included everything from simple messaging to video calls, screen sharing, and many other features.
After I released it, the application started spreading quickly, and eventually a businessman contacted me because he wanted this messenger for his company. That was how the story began turning into a business.
After the release, however, I encountered a lot of haters who called it "another AI slop" and similar things. They simply did not understand how it had been built or how readable the code actually was.
Later, I made the entire project open source, so anyone who is interested can visit the GitHub repository, look through the source code, or download the applications and see how they work, as well as the huge potential that AI-assisted software development has today.
Many people say that source code generated with AI is impossible to read. But I think they do not understand one thing: everything is moving toward a future where humans will no longer need to read most of the source code themselves. Because of that, I believe we should approach these technologies with an open mind, test them, and try to use them effectively.
The same thing happened in the past with programming languages like C++. Back when I was in university, one of my professors used to say that you absolutely had to know Assembly, because without Assembly you would never build anything worthwhile in C++. He did not understand one thing, though. He was right—but only partially. Maybe you could not build certain low-level or fundamental systems without Assembly, but a huge number of practical applications could be built without requiring any knowledge of it.
Later, even higher-level languages appeared, such as JavaScript, along with frameworks like Node.js.
And now AI is simply the next stage in the evolution of software development.
Posted Jul 30, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC