Build with AI

Build with AI — building a whole application

Build with AI turns one description, such as a CRM with contacts, companies, teams and tasks, into a complete application: its tables, its functions, its screens, a home page and a menu. This page covers what happens during such a build, what you see while it runs, and how long to expect it to take. For a single screen or a single change, ask PIES AI in the chat instead; see How PIES AI works.

What a whole-app build does

PIES AI first plans the application from your description, then builds it in phases, each phase finishing before the next one starts:

Tables — one unit of work per table, with its columns, relationships and sample rows.
Functions — the logic the tables need, such as creating, updating and listing records.
Screens — for each table, a list screen and a form (and a detail screen where one helps), then the home page and the menu.

Inside a phase, several units run side by side.

Every screen gets a design pass

Each generated screen goes through the same design path as a screen you ask for in the chat. A table's list, form and detail screens start from a working layout bound to the table, and are then designed: a header, the content grouped into labelled sections and cards, the form's Save and Cancel buttons kept with their events unchanged, and the app's own theme colours. The design is then judged against the same design standard the chat uses, and a screen that falls short is repaired before the build moves on. The home page and the menu are built the same way, from the application's data model.

So a screen from a whole-app build should look like a screen you asked for one at a time. If one does not, select it and ask PIES AI to redesign it; it changes only that screen.

User profile fields go in their own table

The built-in user and role tables belong to PIES Studio, so a build never adds your own columns to them. When your description asks for details about each user, such as a job title, phone number or avatar, PIES AI creates a separate profile table linked to the user (for example user_profiles, with a user_id that points to the user) and puts those fields there. Your screens then read and save the profile through that table.

What you see while it runs

The build panel shows Building… planning while PIES AI plans, then Phase N · building in parallel while each phase runs, and ends with ✅ Built (N phases) or ⚠️ Needs review.
Each phase lists its units, such as Build Contacts, with their status as they finish.
Agent map opens a live map of the build: the build itself and every unit it started, each marked with the phase it belongs to. Open a unit to read its transcript.
Stop ends the build. What was already built stays in the application.

Cloud and private models

Which model builds each unit is decided by your organisation's AI governance policies, and an application can carry its own policy; see Governance policies.

When the units run on a cloud model, the build fans out: up to four units of a phase run at once.
When they run on a private (local) model, units run one at a time, so the same build takes several times longer.

How long it takes

A whole application is a large build, and its time grows with the number of tables. As a guide from our own test builds, a CRM-sized application of around ten tables plans well over a hundred units and takes an hour or more on a cloud model, and several hours on a private model.

You can keep working in Studio while it runs. If the PIES Studio server restarts during a build, the build stops with Interrupted — the server restarted while this loop was running. Everything finished before the restart is kept; start the build again to finish the rest.