I recently finished building a small AI-powered translation app called PollyGlot.

The project came from Scrimba’s AI Engineer Path as a breakout challenge. We were given a Figma file, design assets, and a clear goal: build a working AI application.

What made this project interesting wasn’t just the AI — it was the constraints.

The app was intentionally built with:

• HTML
• vanilla CSS
• vanilla JavaScript

No frameworks. No libraries doing the heavy lifting.

At first, that felt almost old-school. But it quickly became the most valuable part of the project.

Without abstractions, every UI decision mattered. I had to manually manage state, loading states, error handling, and async API calls. Styling meant thinking through layout and responsiveness instead of relying on utility classes.

Once the core app worked, I added stretch goals to push it further:

• Integrating OpenAI’s API for translations
• Adding basic rate limiting to protect the endpoint
• Handling edge cases and failure states
• Deploying the app to Vercel using serverless functions

At that point, it stopped feeling like a “toy project.”

It became a genuinely modern full-stack application.

There was a frontend UI built from a real design spec. There was backend logic running in a serverless environment. There were environment variables, deployment configs, and fast-moving SDKs to keep up with.

That last part is something I think a lot about lately.

AI tooling is evolving incredibly fast. APIs change. SDKs get updated. Best practices shift. The only way I’ve found to stay grounded is to keep building small, focused projects that force me to understand what’s actually happening under the hood.

This project reinforced something important for me:

Fundamentals don’t slow you down — they make you more adaptable.

And maybe just as important: this was fun.

Building things end-to-end, solving real problems, and watching something go from a design file to a live app is still one of the best ways I know to learn.

Link to app>>> https://polygott-app.vercel.app/
Link to Github >>> https://github.com/bluecollarcoders/ai-pollyglot-app