How a Nigerian developer built an AI tool used by a16z engineers

Sampson Ovuoba believes building UI should not be code-heavy, so he built Windframe for developers to build visually. Today, engineers from a16z use the platform for prototyping.

Sampson Ovuoba believes building a website is fundamentally a visual process, so the idea of writing heavy code to achieve something artistic never quite sat right with him.

“UI (user interface) shouldn’t be too code-heavy,” he says. “It is a visual thing, not logic.”

He is not advocating for the complete removal of code, but rather a middle ground — a way for developers to visually create what they want and then generate production-ready code. That idea led him to launch Windframe in July 2021.

Building Windframe  

Building a website with Windframe

It took Ovuoba and a friend seven months to build Windframe, and it was not an easy process, especially considering it came a year before ChatGPT took off and AI became mainstream.

At the time, AI was not part of the plan. The focus was on templates.

“I built a large collection of templates, and we also added a feature that lets users import their own templates into the platform,” he says.

To make it work, Ovuoba had to learn how browsers function and build a custom rendering engine capable of handling different types of code and design. The effort paid off. Within two days of launch, Windframe had its first 100 users.

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He launched it on Product Hunt and shared it on Reddit. Getting a paying user on the first day signalled something important; what started as a personal frustration was clearly a problem other developers wanted solved.

Today, Windframe has 16,000 users and has grown into more than just a side project for Ovuoba.

Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer

Techpoint Digest

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By 2023, AI had entered the picture. With APIs from OpenAI becoming widely available, he began exploring how to integrate AI into the product.

Now, Windframe uses generative AI to turn simple text prompts into fully structured UI layouts, ...