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A Falcon 9 launch on October 13th left a jellyfish-shaped cloud glowing over Florida for close to ten minutes, ice crystals in the exhaust plume lit up by a sun that had already set at ground level. People filmed it like they'd spotted something from another planet.
That shape wasn't designed. It's three unrelated things landing in the same ninety seconds: rocket altitude, sun angle, and water vapor freezing at exactly the right temperature.
Client calls run on the same kind of accident, just smaller. The moment that gets a gasp on a review call is almost never the part that took three weeks, the data structure, the CMS setup, the accessibility pass. It's a two-line hover animation built in an afternoon.
I've stopped chasing credit for the invisible 90% of a build. The visible 10% is what gets remembered, so that's the part I polish hardest, and I let the rest do its job quietly underneath.
What's the smallest thing you ever shipped that got the biggest reaction out of a client?
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1 designer + base44 + 3 days without proper sleep = Overdrive🤍
A job tracking system for a car repair shop.
✱ One board showing every car on the floor, where each one stands and what’s holding it up.
Add a car, assign the work, and from there it tracks itself- what’s late, which parts have landed, who’s in today. Visit history, receipts, and a widget that tells you the next free slot you can offer someone.
Three days. Not smooth ones. But it’s live❗️
✱ Now the why, because none of those features were my idea.
My client owns the shop. Four mechanics, up to seven cars a day, no front desk. For months he’d complain about the same stuff whenever we talked: parts he ordered and forgot about, mechanics starting one car and getting pulled onto another, people asking when they can bring a car in and him not knowing what to say.
It was never a brief, of course, he was just talking. But one day I asked him properly: what do you need to see the moment you walk in?
✱ He said four things. And those four made sense as widgets, naturally.
Nothing on the job board gets typed in by a person. For example, a car shows as blocked because the mechanic who has it is off today- the board works that out and writes the reason on the card. He doesn’t walk around the shop asking anyone, he can just see it now.
✱ And the part nobody puts in these posts😅
→ It is my first time ever (!) using Base44 and I started without a paid plan, so I had a hard limit on how many prompts I got.
You can’t iterate your way to something like that. Every prompt had to arrive already correct, which meant almost all of the work happened before I typed anything. I designed every screen and every state in Figma first, then worked out exactly what to ask for and in what order.
I spent hours with Claude and Google figuring out how to phrase things, what would break, what to check before changing anything. I’d write a prompt and then throw it away and write a better one, because a wasted prompt cost more than the time did 🤷🏻♀️
Honestly, the constraint made it better. No aimless tinkering. Every change had a reason before it was made, and I still got every core feature I wanted in there.
✸Research: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVEWOXy9k=/?share_link_id=813311021448
✸Walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/69ffa2d58ca24e7bb10676be5173cdc2
✸Overdrive live demo: https://overdrive-shop-flow.base44.app
✸X thread: https://x.com/gurvchler/status/2114517480152740121?s=20
✸LinkedIn post: https://lnkd.in/p/dysRmrNw
Skycall 🎈: the dawn call, made automatically
An AI-powered operations brain for hot-air balloon operators, wrapped in a cinematic, living website. Tomorrow’s forecast comes in, the call gets made, and every passenger hears about it, with nobody working the phones.
Every balloon operator knows the feeling: it’s 6 pm and the forecast just changed. The pilot is reading wind at three heights while dozens of passengers set alarms for 4 am. Then the phone tree starts: voicemails, the wrong hotel, a family that flew halfway around the world, told at midnight. Tomorrow evening, the same again. Skycall turns that whole evening into one automated flow, so a small operator can run like a big one.
The problem: dawn flights live or die on the wind, and every “no” lands on a person with a phone. Rebooking is done by hand, empty seats go unfilled, and reviews blame the operator for the sky. The decision belongs to the pilot. The messaging shouldn’t eat their evening.
The solution:
The evening call. At 18:00 Skycall reads tomorrow’s forecast at the surface, 80 m and 180 m, checks it against the operator’s own limits, and calls it GO, HOLD or NO-GO, with the reasons in plain English.
Every passenger told automatically. Each one gets an email with the verdict, meeting point, what to wear and a calendar link.
The dawn recheck. Two hours before launch it looks again, and only writes if the sky changed.
One-tap rebooking. A no comes with two flyable dates, one tap each. Quiet after 24 h? A reminder. Still quiet? Pencilled onto the next flyable dawn.
Waitlist seat fill. On a GO with empty seats, the waitlist gets a 45-minute offer, and the first tap wins.
The crew manifest. The pilot’s phone shows passengers, basket load against the maximum, a hot-dawn warning and the hotel pickup order.
A Monday digest for the owner, plus a public ops log where every automated run is on the record.
A live demo console where anyone can run the call on any sky and watch it happen.
Built on Base44: 15 entities and 21 backend functions sharing one rules engine. The forecast comes live from Open-Meteo, and scheduling runs via an external cron hitting a Base44 backend function. This build runs a demo operator: the operator and bookings are demo data, and the passenger emails go to a demo inbox. The forecast, the decisions and the sends are real.
Skycall is a planning aid. Every verdict is advisory, and the pilot in command decides.
🔗 Skycall
Alibi: Know before you ship.
Every designer knows this moment: two versions on the screen, a deadline, and a team that can't agree. Usually the loudest opinion wins. I wanted a place where you can just ask people instead.
So I built Alibi, a social network for quick design studies. You post a question, people answer in a couple of taps, and in a few hours/days you get a clear verdict. Not feedback from a client who has seen your file twenty times :) but a fresh take from people who see it for the first time.
What you can test:
• Compare: which of 2-4 versions works better
• First click: where people click first, shown as a heatmap
• First impression: your design is shown for 5 seconds, then one question
• Feedback: a quick 1-5 score
Across product design, graphic design, copy, motion and product ideas.
Why I'd scroll it myself
I spend way too much time scrolling Threads anyway. With Alibi that time actually turns into something: I see how other designers think, I get ideas, and my two taps help someone ship a better version.
Automation - what happens on its own:
• You set a secret success rule that only you see, like "A wins with at least 60%"
• The study closes itself at its answer target or deadline and counts everything automatically: shares, heatmaps, averages
• You get a verdict, Confirmed or Not confirmed, and everyone who answered gets notified
• Ran out of time? Extend by 7 days, keep it as is, or close it early
• Base44 Superagent lives inside the app. Describe what you want to find out in plain words, drop in your images, and it fills in the whole study: category, type, question, answers and the success rule. Ask for changes in chat, then publish. Works on the phone too!)
• Prefer doing it yourself? The step-by-step flow has AI suggest the category and tell you why.
How it's made
Wireframes in Figma first, then the whole app was built in Base44 together with Superagent, in one chat and on the canvas, and polished screen by screen.
A few things I cared about along the way:
• A calm monochrome look in Geist with no shouting caps, so the work being tested stays in focus
• The phone isn't a shrunk desktop: a glass tab bar, a header that hides on scroll, Superagent drafts as cards in the chat
• Motion stays light.
A small dream
Big brands already hang out in comments and reply to memes. Imagine them asking people about a new icon or a small update right in a feed like this 🙂
Try it: https://alibi-app.base44.app
(The feed is filled with sample studies so you can try everything right away.)
Full walkthrough is in the comments.
Built with @base44 #Base44Challenge