The SMT Chronicles - MVP Version 1 - Oct 24 to June 25, building with AI co-pilots

Over the last year, I've been building an experimental app, SMT (Software Management Tools) that started out initially out of curiosity to test LLM's ability of code generation, before the proliferation of AI coding agents and integrated development environments or vibe coding platforms. I worked on this project in my spare time over weekends and evenings, testing the waters - often getting quite frustrated in the early days, sometimes having streaks of productivity and other times, just pure going in circles and breaking things - often found myself cursing the AI :-) I didn't give up, despite the breaks with long periods of inactivity, I kept monitoring the latest AI news and releases - and continued to test the waters. Each time, learning something new, seeing the progress of LLMs, witnessing the pure potential this technology has to not only disrupt the software industry, but also the immense potential at empowering people to translate ideas and concepts into prototypes, without depending on outsourced developers. The journey of learning continues. I stuck with Gemini because it has, since the beginning been enormously generous with quotas and large context windows, unlike Claude and ChatGPT at the time. Even today, I prefer to stick with learning just one tool like Antigravity than to context switch with others - although my workflow includes Antigravity Agent Manager, and a separate VSCode with Codex to audit changes and pick up where Gemini or Claude Opus fails to complete their tasks.

Here's the activity story from GitHub:

I also created a simple dashboard using Antigravity for my repo's storyline here. 

In this post, I'm sharing some history of SMT. How did all begin? Interestingly enough, I went through a phase of saving major chat sessions with Gemini, that led to the first MVP of SMT. I saved all my prompts in google docs. I stopped tracking my prompts in June because it got quite tedious! With this chat record, I wanted to see what Google's NotebookLM would make of the doc's contents, here is what it produced - super fascinating the power of NotebookLM!

NotebookLM generated this infographic that was spot on! 

By June 2025, SMT's main feature was the Yearly Planning page - the inspiration behind the planning feature of SMT came from my Amazon AWS experience of their yearly planning mechanism called Operational Planning (OP1 & OP2) cycles. The lack of tooling within the company made the process quite time-consuming, error prone and not fun at all! We used spreadsheets in either Excel or Quip (Quip is a pain for spreadsheeting!). So SMT was going to make OP planning much more fun, and accurate as well - especially when calculating net engineering capacity. SMT is a proof-of-concept, but if anyone from AWS is reading this post, feel free to play with the app, get the codebase and have a go at using it for your team's planning. The app works fine IMHO but still has a lot more features to add.

NotebookLM generated this audio overview, mostly correct!

NotebookLM generated this slide deck...

NotebookLM generated this video...

My chat transcripts with Gemini from April 25 to June 25 - 50+ pages!