Product Requirement Document
📌 Overview
AI App Builder Evaluation — Mobile News App Project:
AI News Platform Team
Contributors: Charlyn Truong
Status: In Progress
TL;DR: A mobile news app that delivers quick, digestible updates on global events for users on the go. This project focuses on evaluating different AI app-building tools by using a single prompt to generate and compare how each platform builds the same product.
The project started with nothing more than a problem worth solving — no visual direction, no feature list, no design reference. Going straight into an app builder made it clear quickly that the design process still matters, even with AI doing the building. What Replit did was surface that gap: seeing the app come to life, even in its simplest first version, and watching changes happen in real time through iterations made it obvious how much clearer the vision needs to be before touching a builder. Ultimately this project became as much a lesson in process as it was a tool comparison — how projects should be approached, how much pre-work design thinking actually saves, and how genuinely useful AI tools are as a partner in the design process, not just a shortcut around it.
A comparative evaluation of four AI app builders - Lovable, v0 by Vercel, Bolt, and Emergent - each given the same single prompt to build a mobile news app. The goal is to assess output quality, ease of use on the free tier, and how each builder handles iteration.
Replit was used during discovery to define the target feature set. It is the control standard, not a builder under evaluation.
The App
A lightweight mobile news app for on-the-go users who want to stay informed without reading full articles. Short, scannable snippets personalized by interest. A summary view before committing to a full article. Designed to be scrolled, not read — fast, minimal, distraction-free.
🎯 Goals
What a successful output looks like across all builders:
Problem
Too many AI app builders have launched with overlapping promises. It's hard to know which is actually worth using solo builders or first-time builders on the free tier. This project creates a controlled test to find out.
Discovery: Replit
Before the formal evaluation began, the app was first built in Replit. This wasn't planned as part of the test — it was an early attempt that ended up becoming the most valuable step in the process. Building in Replit without a clear design direction revealed how much pre-work the design process requires before going into a builder. It also defined what the app should actually be — the feature set, the flow, the interactions. Everything Replit surfaced through trial and error became the target that the four builders are now measured against. Replit is the control standard, not a competitor.
App Requirements / Build Targets
These are the features each builder will be prompted to produce. All builders receive the same starting prompt. The core list reflects the evolved target after iteration — the starting prompt, was MVP only.
Core features that are required and iterated across all builders
Nice to Have (used to test iteration depth)
Pull-to-refresh
Dark mode
Category filter tabs
Real article links
Interchangeable between web view and mobile view
Evaluation Criteria
🧠 Out of Scope
Real news API · Authentication · Backend logic · Production Deployment · Cross-builder feature parity