A
Aurora

My Current Progress on Neura.ink

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update

Let's go a little back...
This whole thing started out of sheer boredom. I was looking for something to kill time with, so I figured I’d build a small project. That “small” project quickly turned into a mess of random features and overcomplicated tech choices, which, in hindsight, I probably should have avoided. But here we are.

Overview
I’ve been working on Neura.ink for a couple of weeks now, logging about 3-4 days of actual work. Things are moving along, but I know there are probably a ton of bugs and issues hidden somewhere in both the frontend and backend.

I turned off ESLint checks during the build process because I didn’t want to bother with them initially. In hindsight, that was a dumb decision, but I’m not exactly eager to turn them back on.

Tech Stack

Backend
The backend is built with Node.js and Express for the API. It’s not a horrible choice, but it definitely wasn’t my smartest move. I thought this would be a quick little project to kill time, but of course, I ended up adding random features and getting a bit too invested.

Frontend
For the frontend, I’m using TypeScript and Next.js. It's generally a good combo, but I’ve definitely made some questionable decisions along the way. The frontend looks fine from a user’s point of view, but the code? It's a mess. I’m starting to think I might need to rewrite it to clean things up.

Features and Integrations

I’ve thrown in a bunch of features, more than I initially planned. Some of the highlights include:

  • AI image generation
  • Email services (temporary and permanent)
  • Manga readers
  • Discord, Spotify, and PayPal integrations
    And more. Cool stuff, but reliable? Not at all. The backend’s disorganized, and I’m sure someone could find an exploit pretty quickly.

The guest system is especially bad. It lets users rack up free generation credits—easy to abuse.

Next Steps

While the features technically work, I don’t trust them to be secure long-term. I’ll probably finish polishing the existing features, but a complete rewrite is looking more likely. I’d go for a more secure and reliable system with TypeScript across the board.

At this point, I’m either going to abandon it or give it a major overhaul. Either way, I know it’s going to take a lot of work to make it functional and secure.

Conclusion

The project’s a mess, plain and simple. I either need to fix it up or start over with something more solid. Neither option is easy, but I’ve clearly dug myself into a hole. At the end of the day, it’s not going to be quick or simple. I’ll deal with it—unless, of course, I get bored and ditch it, like I do with most of my side projects.