Prompting
Our top tips from the team and community on how to chat with Create to build apps
Create understands both text and images to build your app. You’ll get better results if you’re clear. Soon, you’ll notice it’s way faster than coding.
Prompting is a fancy word for “writing instructions to an AI”. AI models can make mistakes, so there are better and worse ways to write the same instructions to get what you want.
Tips
Many of these tips work in combo :)
Set the scene at the start
❌ Don’t: be vague - landing page
✅ Do: set a clear context and goals:
Make small changes
❌ Don’t: try to do many things all at once - Make a social media site that lets users logs in, saves their posts, shows them in a feed, lets you like each card in the feed, and lets send invites to new friends
✅ Do: break down complex tasks into smaller steps:
Use Images
You can paste images into the chat. You’ll get best results if you add more context with a description of what about the image you want.
On a Mac, try Control + Command + Shift + 4 to easily save a screenshot to your clipboard- ready to paste with Command + V!
Examples:
✅ Do: replicate exactly (might require multiple passes / images):
✅ Do: make something similar:
✅ Do: style specific elements:
✅ Do: extract text content:
✅ Do: use for inspiration:
✅ Do: apply styles:
You can get very specific
To make something exact, you can even specify details like hex codes, fonts, or spacing, if you want. If you don’t know, just describe in English and Create will get close.
Example:
✅ Do: get close in English if you don’t know:
✅ Do: get specific on values
Be specific on errors
❌ Don’t: vague- It's still not working. Ugh
✅ Do: describe the exact issue:
❌ Don’t: vague- Nothing works!
✅ Do: explain the specific problem:
❌ Don’t: vague- The date picker is wrong
✅ Do: describe the exact issue with context:
❌ Don’t: vague- The back button isn't working
✅ Do: explain the specific problem with details:
If you see a error message, you can often just paste it back into the chat to give Create more context.
Avoid “too long” → break into components
As your project grows long, Create can sometimes have a harder time making changes. You can combat this by breaking your project into more elements (components, functions, etc).
Project-wide vs Single Element
You can prompt Create at two different levels:
- Project-wide: Select the project name in Project Selector or tap on the canvas itself
- Single element: Select a specific element in the Project Selector or tap it on the canvas
Many of the tips above work at either level, but there are some things you can do specifically at each level.
Learn more about the different elements you can use in Create in the Builder Overview.
Larger projects often have multiple Pages, Components, Functions, and a Database or User Accounts.
Project-wide prompts
Create can make changes across the entire project in parallel and/or create new elements if they don’t exist.
When you have the project selected, you can make prompts that:
✅ Add new elements across your app:
This will update existing elements in parallel and/or create new elements if they don’t exist:
- Dashboard (page)
- Table (component)
- Nav (component)
- Search (component)
- About (page)
✅ Handle interactions between elements:
This will:
- Update the linking on the back button in the about page
- Get the route from the home page
✅ Break down complex pages:
This will:
- Break down the page into separate components
- Make new components as needed
- Update the page to use the new components
✅ Connect data across pages:
This handles:
- Database queries on multiple pages
- Routing between pages
- Passing data via query params
✅ Style across pages and components
This will:
- Update the dashboard page to match the screenshot
- Update all components that are used on the dashboard page to match the new style
Single Element prompts
Create only makes changes to the specific element you’ve selected (Page, Component, Function, etc).
With a specific element selected, you can make more targeted changes:
✅ Style specific elements:
✅ Debug specific functionality:
✅ Add focused features:
Switch between levels as needed - start with project-wide prompts for overall structure, then drill down to single elements for fine-tuning. Or start from a single element for simplicity, and then go back to project-wide level as you add more elements.
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