Guide · Build in public
Building in Public with AI: A Practical Guide
Building in public means shipping your work — code, product, decisions, mistakes — where other people can see it. Doing it with AI tools like Lovable, Cursor, Bolt, Replit, and v0 changes the tempo: you can ship something real every single day. This guide covers how to make that a durable habit and turn it into an audience.
Why build in public with AI
The traditional "build in public" playbook was written for founders who shipped weekly. AI codegen collapses that cycle to hours. A single builder using Lovable can go from prompt to deployed URL before lunch, which means the story you're telling isn't "here's a roadmap" — it's "here's what I shipped today, and here's what broke."
That shift matters for three reasons:
- Feedback loops shrink. Post a screenshot, get a bug report the same afternoon.
- Your audience compounds. Daily posts are the fastest way to be discoverable in a noisy feed.
- The work is the marketing. The demo is the post; no separate content plan required.
The daily shipping streak
The single highest-leverage habit for building in public is a shipping streak: one post per day about something you actually shipped. Not a plan, not an idea — a change users could touch.
What counts as "shipped" is broader than a deploy:
- A new feature live in production
- A bug you found and fixed in front of everyone
- A tool comparison or teardown you learned something from
- A prompt or workflow that saved you an hour
ShippedIn is built around this loop — every post is tagged with the AI tool that helped you ship it, and your streak counter lives at the top of your profile. Miss a day, it resets. The visible streak does more for consistency than any productivity system.
Choosing your stack
Most builders shipping in public today are combining two or three AI tools:
- Lovable — full-stack web apps from a prompt, with Supabase wired in.
- Cursor — AI-native editor for iterating on the generated code.
- Bolt — quick web prototypes in the browser.
- Replit — end-to-end app building with hosting baked in.
- v0 — component and UI generation.
The right choice is the one that lets you ship today. Pick one, ship the smallest possible thing, post it, then iterate.
Post types that work
Four formats consistently drive engagement in build-in-public feeds:
- Ship — "I shipped X today, here's the link."
- Ask — "Has anyone solved Y with tool Z?"
- Feedback — "Roast this landing page."
- Discussion — "Here's what I learned about prompting for auth flows."
Rotate through them. Pure "ship" posts every day get flat; asks and discussions bring replies, which bring reach.
Growing an audience while you build
Audience follows consistency more than quality. Three rules:
- Post the same day you ship, not later.
- Reply to every comment on your posts for the first month.
- Follow ten other builders you'd want feedback from, and actually engage with their work.
Communities like ShippedIn concentrate the audience that already cares about AI-built apps, which means you skip the cold-start problem of posting into an empty feed.
Start today
The whole point is momentum. Pick a tool, ship the smallest possible thing before you close your laptop, and post it. Then do it again tomorrow.