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Cover image for Making prompts - an app that gets you out of writer's blocks using Reddit APIs and Deta
Sreeram Venkitesh for Deta

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Making prompts - an app that gets you out of writer's blocks using Reddit APIs and Deta

As developers we know best that sometimes the best way to avoid an idea block is to just start coding (Weeks of coding can save hours of planning, but that's for another story)

Here we are talking about writer's blocks. Coming up with an enjoyable piece of literature can be as challenging as programming, sometimes even more so.

Prompts (live at prompts.deta.dev) is a simple app that I made for writers to exercise their brains hopefully recover from a writer's block.

The sleek homepage

Prompts works by fetching story prompts from the r/WritingPrompts subreddit and presenting them to you in a minimalistic editor where you can complete the rest of the story.

Prompts editor

There are several options to spice up the challenge - you can set yourself a timer and see how much you can write in a fixed amount of time and also calculate your typing speed

Timer and typing speed

Once you are done, you can keep the story you wrote for yourself by exporting it as a document. If you didn't like the prompt you got you can always load another prompt from the menu.


Prompts is hosted with Deta Micros. Deta's Micros or Micro Servers lets you host your Python and Node.js apps in seconds with just their CLI tool. Check out more about them at deta.sh

The code for prompts is open-source at my GitHub here. Any contributions are welcome! (If you are planning to run it locally, the instructions to set up your own Deta Micros is given in the repo's README.md file)

Prompts is also featured in ProductHunt. You can check it out here


What do you think about prompts? What all features would you like to add to prompts? Share your feedback in the comments!

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