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Meet BowSmith: An Archery App Born from AI and Obsession

Meet BowSmith: An Archery App Born from AI and Obsession

What happens when an archer with too many ideas meets AI-powered coding tools? An experiment that became an app.

English

The Short Version

BowSmith is an iOS app for bow archers and 3D shooters. It helps you track your equipment, calculate arrow setups, generate sight tapes, and keep your tuning dialed in — all in one place.

But how it came to exist is a different story.

The Problem I Wanted to Solve

First idea was to solve the problem with paper score cards at competitions during for example bad weather. This is where it started and got multiple pivots on gear tunning, history tracking etc. Meawhile some good apps on comptition scoring appear on the market so we moved sideway to diffrent direction.

Enter the AI Experiment

In late 2023, I started experimenting with something called vibe coding — using AI web assistants like Claude leter Cursor to build software through conversation rather than traditional line-by-line programming.

The idea was simple: What if I could describe what I wanted, and the AI would help me build it? as I am not a developer.
I obserwed the growth of AI models, tools and tried to evolve the idea of the app with it. Early 2025 it started to look like it accually might work.

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What "Vibe Coding" Actually Means

For those unfamiliar, vibe coding is a term for a new way of building software where:

  • You describe what you want in plain language
  • AI generates the code based on your description
  • You guide the direction, test results, and iterate

It's not "AI does everything" — it's more like having an incredibly fast collaborator who never gets tired of your changing requirements. So much of theory, practice was completly diffrent. rly stages was a continous frustraction also due to fact we got major problems that looked easy to solve but for Dev not QA. It took a lot of time and trust till progress was made.. AI is stile often junior and makes many silly mistakes. First day of newsletter was 8 test emails send to whole mailgroup for example.

Why I'm Sharing This Publicly

This blog exists to blog section will be here document the journey:

  • Monthly updates on what's new in BowSmith
  • Tutorials showing how to use features
  • Behind-the-scenes posts about development challenges
  • Honest reflections on building an app this way

Whether you're here for the archery content or curious about AI-assisted development, I hope you find something useful. I will try to mixe the project progress updates mixed with AI experiment observations.

What's Next

BowSmith is currently in alpha pre-testing with a small group of archers. Alpha tests are planned in Q1-Q2.2026, If you're interested in:

Let's see where this experiment goes.

Stay Connected

Newsletter: Subscribe at bowsmith.app for monthly updates.

YouTube: BowSmith Archery Labs for tutorials and deep dives.