Dexla
An AI-powered app builder: drag, drop and describe your way to a real product, with the editor doing the heavy lifting.
Dexla let technical and non-technical founders ship real apps fast: a drag-and-drop editor with AI woven through it, from generating layouts to fixing bugs. I joined as a junior engineer alongside three seniors, starting on bug fixes and new canvas components, then growing into owning the builder's performance.
The product stayed in closed beta: a few dozen testers from the waitlist and three paying customers. I built the MVP for all three on the tool itself, working directly with each founder. One of them, Airstride, later hired me.
- Role
- Software Engineer (joined as Junior)
- Duration
- 2023 — 2025
- Team
- 3 senior engineers + me · 2 designers · 2 PMs
- Stack
- Next.jsTypeScriptMantineReact QueryReactflowPythonFastAPI
The hard parts.
Contributed to a bespoke drag-and-drop library for the editor, adding components and fixing the sync bugs that kept real-time state consistent while several people edited at once.
Integrated Claude & OpenAI for context-aware actions (change design, fix bugs, connect data) driving a 35% lift in engagement after release.
Translated complex Figma hand-offs into a fluid Mantine UI, the detail that earned repeated praise from designers and PMs for fidelity and polish.
Cut initial load 3.2s → 2.4s (25%) with code-splitting and render optimisation, and removed 30% of redundant network calls by unifying endpoints behind React Query caching.