Projects
Building Encore Prophet: What I Learned
Lessons from building Encore Prophet with agentic development tools.
I recently finished a project called Encore Prophet. It is a tool for music fans to generate playlists based on upcoming concert sets. While the product itself is fun to use, the process of building it taught me a lot about working with agentic development tools.
You can see the live app at encoreprophet.com.
The Problem with Critical Integrations
One of the biggest lessons was the importance of investigating critical integrations early. I wanted to connect directly to services like Spotify, but it turns out you need 250,000 monthly active users to even get that level of access.
I had to use Tune My Music as a workaround, but the UX there is not great. It requires a lot of manual copy and pasting. If I had dug into the API requirements on day one, I might have adjusted the product strategy earlier.
Development Workflow
This was a great test case for my agentic development setup. I spent a lot of time comparing different tools and workflows.
Local tools are better than web tools. I found that local agents like OpenCode provided a much tighter inner dev loop than mobile or web-based tools. Local tools are faster and don’t suffer from the sync issues I ran into with other platforms.
Context management matters. I started moving toward more advanced OpenCode configurations to save time. This included using default models and packaging common commands into bash scripts to reduce token usage and speed up iterations.
Deployment. Using Docker from the start made deployment much simpler. I hosted it on Google Cloud Run, which worked well, though I learned that you need to use specific US regions if you want to use custom domain mappings.
Technical Takeaways
- Start with a spec. It is much easier to steer an agent when you have a clear plan from the beginning.
- Hot reload is critical. For UI work, being able to see changes instantly is still the most effective way to work, even with an agent.
- Testing strategy. Having a clear strategy using Playwright and unit testing from the start saves a lot of time on back-and-forth debugging.
Encore Prophet is as good as it is going to get for now. It is a useful product, even if the monetization path is not clear. Most importantly, the lessons I learned there are already making my next projects move much faster.