Hi HN,

I have a confession: I’m not a developer. > Like many people here, I’ve been blown away by Cursor, Bolt, and Codex. But as a non-technical person, I quickly hit a wall. It wasn't that the AI couldn't code—it was that I didn't know how to describe what I wanted. > I would give a 1-sentence prompt, get a broken app, and then get stuck in a "bug-fixing loop" because I hadn't defined the logic, the database schema, or the edge cases properly. I had the vision, but I lacked the "Technical Grammar" to communicate it.

I built https://ideaforge.chat to solve my own problem.

It acts as the "Technical Co-founder" or "Product Manager" I didn't have. Instead of me struggling to write a prompt, the tool interviews me. It asks the questions I didn't know I should be asking (e.g., "How should we handle session persistence?" or "What's the data relationship between X and Y?").

How it works for me:

I chat with IdeaForge about my "napkin sketch" idea.

It grills me on the details until the logic is watertight.

It generates a structured Markdown specification.

I paste that spec into Cursor/Codex.

For the first time, I’m actually building tools that work on the first try. I’m sharing this today because I think there are many other "dreamers" who are just one clear specification away from their first functional MVP.

I’d love to get the perspective of the experienced engineers here: Does the output look like something you’d actually want to receive as a dev spec?

Thanks for letting me share!

I'm probably not the target audience, but it's an intriguing idea for a product.

However you have no privacy policy or about page. I don't think I'd want to use a remote tool without one, otherwise how do I know you're not going to run away with my idea?

I started to do this as well. Instead of prompting: "build x", I now prompt: "What questions do you need to ask me in order to have all the information you need to build x". It usually writes a long list of questions, which, once answered makes the thing a lot clearer for the AI to work.

If you don't do this, LLMs tend to make a lot of asumptions on their own without telling you.

It works for pretty much anything. Like medical advice: "What questions do you need to ask to diagnose my headache". Or practical help: "what questions do you need to ask to help me hang this mirror on the wall"

I use custom GPTs for interviewing me about requirements then producing a spec (https://chatgpt.com/g/g-69724a25850c8191a6f16a519b5ae055-sof...).

I use another GPT to turn that spec into a development plan for Codex that I include in AGENTS.md. (https://chatgpt.com/g/g-698a6ee58aec8191ba1e3b520b13b5e7-dev...)

I'm curious what advantages this product offers vs. using a prompt?

Great idea, and some of the tools are already somewhat covering it, e.g. GSD or spec-kit.

https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done

https://github.com/github/spec-kit

I gave up at step 5. it's taking too long