This post is my submission for DEV Education Track: Build Apps with Google AI Studio. Existing pet lost-and-found groups can move very quickly. Important posts often get buried, making it difficult to keep track of previous records or connect a lost pet with a found one.
This gave me the idea to build PetFinder, an AI-powered lost-and-found pet app that helps identify potential matches between lost and found pets by analyzing their photos and information.
The main prompt I used to get started was:
Build a modern, polished web application called PetFinder — an AI-powered Lost & Found Pets platform that helps people report missing pets and find pets that may have been found by others.
The main features include:
Here the fully deployed URL
Building PetFinder with Google AI Studio showed me that you don’t need to be a coding expert to build an app—you just need to know how to describe what you want.
Instead of writing everything from scratch, I started with a simple idea and let AI Studio generate the initial structure. I also learned that the first prompt doesn’t need to be perfect because the entire process is built on interaction.
I could describe a feature, test the result, and then refine it with follow-up prompts. The clearer I was about the behaviour and changes I wanted, the closer the app got to what I had in mind.
Overall, this track showed me that in AI-assisted development, communicating your requirements clearly is just as important as writing the code itself. A good prompt can turn a simple idea into something much closer to the application you envisioned.