A few months ago, if someone had asked me to build a mobile app, I would've had absolutely no idea where to start. Today, an app I built is on the Google Play Store. It's called Stulo, and it's currently in closed testing.

The funny part? I'm not a software engineer. I'm just a college student who got tired of missing opportunities. Internships were on LinkedIn, hackathons were buried somewhere on Instagram, college events lived inside WhatsApp groups, and competitions were scattered across random websites. If the algorithm didn't like you that day, you simply never found them. That felt... ridiculous.

So I asked myself, "Why isn't there one place where students can find everything?" That simple question eventually became Stulo. Today, students can discover internships, hackathons, competitions, campus events, connect with other students, and share updates through a campus feed—all in one app.

The biggest lie I believed was that building the app would be the hard part. It wasn't. Understanding why it wasn't working was.

I built the first version using Emergent because, honestly, I didn't know enough to start from scratch. It got me surprisingly far. As the project became more serious, I moved development to Google AI Studio (Antigravity). That's when I learned something every AI-generated YouTube thumbnail forgets to mention: AI doesn't build products. It generates code. There's a huge difference.

AI happily writes hundreds of lines of code, but it doesn't explain why your images randomly stop rendering after ten minutes, why scrolling suddenly feels like you're using a phone from 2013, or why fixing one bug somehow creates three completely unrelated bugs.

Most days followed the exact same routine: generate code, run the app, watch something break, Google the error, ask AI, read Stack Overflow, realize the problem was my own code, and repeat. Some bugs took ten minutes to fix, while others stole an entire weekend. Looking back, one of the biggest things I learned wasn't Flutter or Firebase—it was patience.

Debugging taught me far more than any tutorial ever could. There wasn't a YouTube video for every problem I faced. Sometimes AI pointed me in the right direction. Sometimes Stack Overflow had the answer. And sometimes I'd spend an hour staring at my screen before realizing I'd missed something incredibly small. Those moments were frustrating, but every bug I solved made me a slightly better developer.

Months later, Stulo finally reached a point where people could actually use it. It's now available on the Google Play Store in closed testing. Students are downloading it, reporting bugs, suggesting new features, and using something that, just a few months ago, only existed as a random idea in my notes app. That feeling is impossible to describe.

Along the way, Stulo has won multiple hackathons and was recognized among the Top 5 startups at an IIT Roorkee startup event. Those moments were exciting, but honestly, the most rewarding notification I've ever received wasn't an award. It was the first bug report from someone I had never met. Because it meant someone cared enough to use something I had built.

Stulo is still unfinished. Images still occasionally misbehave, some interactions aren't as smooth as I'd like, and performance still has room for improvement. But for the first time, those problems don't scare me. They're simply part of the journey.

Building Stulo taught me something I didn't know a few months ago: you don't need to know how to build an app before you start. You just need to be willing to learn, break things, fix them, ask questions, and keep showing up.

The code gets better.

And so do you.