Using ChatGPT to modify an .aia file

Artificial Intelligence
1

I wanted to share something I recently accomplished with ChatGPT and MIT App Inventor because, after searching the Community forum, I could not find another post describing quite the same workflow.

This was not a case of asking AI, “How do I make this block?” and then manually rebuilding the answer in App Inventor.

I gave ChatGPT an actual working MIT App Inventor .aia project.

ChatGPT then worked directly with the internal structure of that project, modified screens, components, properties, and blocks, rebuilt the .aia, and returned the modified project to me.

I imported that returned .aia directly into MIT App Inventor.

It worked.

We repeated this process several times while developing my Oh Hell card-game scorekeeper.

One experiment was especially interesting. I supplied an existing valid project that contained a completely empty screen. I described in ordinary English what that screen was supposed to do. ChatGPT created the required App Inventor components and blocks inside that screen and returned a rebuilt .aia.

The first attempt was not perfect. Some of the generated blocks were corrupted. I showed ChatGPT what had gone wrong, gave it the project again, and it repaired the existing project rather than simply giving me instructions for rebuilding it manually.

The corrected .aia imported successfully and worked.

Since then, we have used essentially the same process to make increasingly specific changes to the application. For example, ChatGPT has modified my winner screen, preserved the existing data being passed between screens, retained the scoring logic, removed obsolete components and blocks, added new components, and returned another importable .aia.

The current working version of the program is V26, and I have also built and tested the Android APK successfully.

What I find particularly interesting is the workflow:

Existing working AIA → natural-language instructions → AI modifies the actual App Inventor project → rebuilt AIA → import into MIT App Inventor → working application

I realize that people have manually edited .aia files before, and there have certainly been experiments involving AI and App Inventor. I am not claiming that this is the first time anyone has ever done this.

What I am saying is that we (ChatGPT and I) searched the MIT App Inventor Community and could not find a documented example of someone using a general-purpose AI this way to repeatedly and successfully modify an existing .aia, including creating App Inventor components and blocks, and then returning a project that could be imported and run.

That surprised me enough that I thought the Community might be interested.

If not, oh well...it worked anyway!

2 Likes
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I congratulate you on your success.

Others have failed ...

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We already had the necessary technology to make this happen since atleast a year, app inventor officially has aptly, and this was my personal effort:

I simply am unsure about continuing such an effort :man_shrugging:

1 Like
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Thanks — Burrow is very interesting, and “agentic coding” is probably a good description of the general approach I was trying to describe.

There may still be a distinction in what I was reporting. I wasn't using a specialized App Inventor AI editor. I gave a general-purpose ChatGPT conversation an existing .aia project, described changes in ordinary language, and received back a modified .aia that I imported directly into the standard MIT App Inventor environment.

We then repeated that cycle through several revisions of the same application, including modifying existing components and blocks rather than generating a new project from scratch.

So perhaps my better question is: Has anyone documented a general-purpose AI repeatedly editing an existing .aia project and returning working, importable revisions?

Thanks for pointing me to your Burrow project and best of luck with it.