Meet MetaGPT: The GPT-Powered Tool to Build Apps in Under 30 Minutes — and We Tried it!

In recent months, we have seen several applications of the GPT-4 language model by OpenAI. The most popular of them is the ChatGPT, an AI chatbot capable of having human-like conversations and providing information based on its available dataset.

Well, ChatGPT is one of many implementations of the GPT-4 model out there. Notable among the rest is MetaGPT.

What is MetaGPT?

MetaGPT is an AI tool that can help you build no-code web apps called “Picos”. The web apps generated using the tool are responsive in design and can be viewed on any desktop or mobile browser.

The process is fairly simple, you get started with the MetaGPT application, enter a detailed description of the application that you wish to get built using the tool, wait for a few minutes, and see the magic happen!

Who’s MetaGPT For?

Are you a developer or programmer looking at MetaGPT as your ticket to chill out and have AI do your work for you?

Well, not really. At least not yet!

For starters, the free tier of MetaGPT only lets you build out one app idea, and make modifications/update them for four times more.

To do anything more, you’ll have to upgrade to their paid subscription plan which costs $29 per month. With the paid plan, you get unlimited app builds, for now, and also get to keep your app builds private.

Moreover, MetaGPT works best with simple one-page web app ideas and isn’t made for complex app ideas. Also, do remember that MetaGPT does not support mobile app builds.

We Used MetaGPT to Build an App, Here’s How it Went

So, we tried to play around with MetaGPT with a few ideas to see where it could lead us.

To start using MetaGPT, you need to first visit their official site at www.picoapps.xyz/builder. After finishing your signup/login process, you will be greeted with a prompt where you have to provide a detailed description of the application that you wish to build, and then click on the “Create” button.

For our first try, we wanted to build something simple.

The idea entered was “build an application that gives me a bodyweight workout with detailed instructions every time I click on a button”.

After clicking on the “Create” button, MetaGPT instantly got to work and we could see the app being built right there. The layout, button, text field, etc. were added to the layout in real-time and MetaGPT also named the app “Bodyweight Workout Generator”.

So, the app does work as we described it. It does show bodyweight exercises when we click on the “Generate Workout” button.

However, after a few tries, we noticed that the workouts suggested are repetitive.

Upon inspecting the code for the app (which can be readily viewed from MetaGPT itself), it was clear that the app is storing (hardcoding) five workouts, namely: push-ups, squats, plank, lunges, and jumping jacks.

Each time you click on the “Generate Workout” button, only one of these five workouts will be shown randomly.

So yeah, the app did get the idea and the design part correctly. But it’s not truly processing any real-time information.

If you’re interested, you can check out the application (until the time it’s hosted) by clicking here.

We also tried to play around a bit more with different ideas and found that in case your app idea requires user input and MetaGPT identifies the same, then you will be prompted to select the type of input you wish to get from the user (or in case if you wish to avoid user inputs) before the app is built.

Did MetaGPT Impress Us?

The use of GPT-4 in MetaGPT is in the code-building process and does not influence the results you get while using the app itself, at least in the ideas we tried out.

MetaGPT does impress us in showing that the power of GPT-4 can make a task such as building a web app as simple as just entering the app idea in a text field. With the developments happening in AI models like GPT, we definitely will be able to see much smarter versions capable of building even complex codes in the near future.