Building Aurora Art Hub: From Starter Template to Creator Platform

May 8, 2026

Aurora Art Hub is a creator platform for artists to publish, manage, and showcase their work. It gives artists a simple profile-based system where they can upload artwork, edit their information, and control what is public or private. The goal is to remove friction from managing an online portfolio and keep the experience clean, fast, and focused on the work itself.

The project started as a Supabase quickstart paired with a Next.js scaffold. AI was used heavily to reshape the quickstart into a more intentional structure—cleaning up the default patterns, adjusting naming, and turning generic examples into real domain concepts around artists and artwork.

Early in the project, I introduced two AI agents to separate concerns: one for Supabase and database work (schemas, RLS, types, queries) and another for Next.js implementation (pages, components, and App Router logic). This created a clear boundary between data design and UI development, turning AI into a structured part of the architecture rather than a general-purpose tool.

Once the foundation was stable, the focus shifted to documentation and structure. AI helped generate and refine internal documentation so the project could stay consistent as it grew. This naturally led to building out a dedicated data access layer, where backend interactions were centralized. AI-assisted iterations helped consolidate data access into reusable query functions and enforce clear boundaries between data, validation, and UI.

With the backend layer in place, the frontend was built on top of it in a more deliberate way. Pages, forms, and components were shaped around the data model. AI was used to speed up repetitive UI scaffolding, but most of the refinement came from tightening flows—how artists create profiles, upload work, and view their own content versus the public experience.

The final phase was polishing. This is where AI helped most with consistency: refining validation messages, cleaning up edge cases like slug handling, improving layout structure, and aligning UI patterns across pages. What started as a quickstart gradually became a cohesive product through repeated cycles of AI-assisted generation and human-led refinement.

In the end, Aurora Art Hub wasn’t built in a straight line. It was shaped through layers—starting from a Supabase template, reshaping it into a domain-driven structure, building a clean backend abstraction, layering a purposeful frontend, and finally polishing it into a focused creator experience.