Case study
From a vibe-coded prototype to a deployed Django app
Soligtera's AI-built prototype for Amber Beaches became a demo-ready Django app and staff area. Squirrel delivered 26 tasks in about 10 hours of our own working time.
Client: Soligtera · Project: Amber Beaches
The situation
Soligtera, which connects businesses with trusted IT experts, arrived with a working but fragile one-page prototype built with AI tools: good screens and copy, but no real backend, accounts, data rules or deployment. The work was to turn it into a demo-ready beach-safety app — flags, safety status, lifeguard coverage and current conditions — and a staff area where authorised people record safety decisions and readings.
That is a different job from a greenfield build: the prototype set the design and the vocabulary, and the list of tasks had to make it real without throwing the screens away.
What this is and is not
This is an interactive prototype built with synthetic data. It is not official safety information.
The 15 beaches are a demo set taken from the supplied UI catalogue, not a verified registry.
What was delivered
All 26 tasks were delivered and the work is complete: the project is demo-ready. We set up the client's task board, code storage and automatic deployment; all three belong to the client. Hosting continues on MB Pikutis infrastructure after delivery, including a separate copy of the site for testing changes.
- The data the app runs on, filled with demo data: 15 beaches across 3 regions, plus safety decisions, measurements, lifeguard cover and log entries.
- Public pages anyone can open without signing in: a coastline view with region cards, a region view with grouped and searchable beaches, and a beach page with flag, safety status, lifeguard coverage and conditions - including a clear OUT-OF-DATE warning when readings go stale.
- A staff area: sign-in, region-scoped access, sidebar layout, an overview with stats, a beaches status table with attention flags, a safety-decision flow with a small confirmation step (history is added to, never overwritten) and measurement capture with history.
- A repeatable way to publish the app, including automatic deployment and a separate copy of the site for testing changes, plus demo data that can be reset and started with one command.
- An operations log.
- Lifeguard shifts and alerting.
- A printable daily report, with the staff screens and the behind-the-scenes code behind it.
- The swap-action fix on the live demo.
Fixed while live
Walking through the deployed site also found and fixed real faults: a page that wrongly sent signed-out visitors to a login screen, an error page where a public data request failed, and a security check that blocked a legitimate form. They are ordinary product tasks, and they are the reason using the deployed site is part of the delivery, not an afterthought.
What is still open
One item is deliberately not built yet:
- Excel schedule upload: the UI is there, the import is not built.
Time and comparison
Squirrel's side is the developer's own estimate of attention time, about 10 hours, worked alongside other tasks. It is not time-sheet data. The baselines below are calculated estimates, so they are shown as ranges; the comparison uses the whole-number estimate.
- Senior developer, no AI
- about 115 h (estimate) estimate
- Senior developer with AI, task by task
- about 33 h (estimate) estimate
- Squirrel
- about 10 h of our working time estimate
Calculated from scope, range 95–135 h.
Prompt, wait, review, iterate. Calculated from scope, range 27–42 h.
Our own estimate of the time we spent on this work, about 10 hours, done alongside other tasks. It is not time-sheet data.
The 10 hours is the developer's own estimate, so the multiples are rounded down and stated cautiously: roughly 11x and 3x.
How to read these numbers
These are estimates, not time-sheet data. They describe this one project, and the prototype supplied the design and the copy. Results will vary by project.
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