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I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

alexhyett.com

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Re: I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

#3

Post by rpdillon »

robertlagrant wrote: post #2

This is how I hope the world will continue to be, because then programming, which is one of the most enjoyable things ever, may remain a human task, assisted by AI and other tools.

Yes! There are a lot of people over using AI right now and a lot of people abstaining, but ultimately I think the development process described in the post will be where we settle. I was told at work that we should adopt AI faster because "we're falling behind" and I tried to explain that the speed of light has not changed. It's our human ability to understand the code and our ability to make decisions about what to do next. AI can only speed up parts of it.

Re: I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

#4

Post by smalltorch »

Were you using exclusively free plans to build your app?

I didn't find app building to take that long, even without knowing the ins and outs of kotlin and swift.

I did find the process of publishing the app to be one of the hardest things. The last 10 - 20 percent of app development still requires a lot of paperwork of you aren't already a developer.

Re: I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

#5

Post by Jeremy1026 »

So, how much was hand-written after the initial 6 hours? It sounds like quite a bit. My experience has been very different. I haven't gotten to the point of releasing anything from AI yet, but I'll spend a weekend throwing prompts, then I'll have an application that does the thing that I asked it to do. I'll use the application over the next week or so keeping a task list of things that I'd want to tweak, bugs, or features that are missing, then I share that document with the AI and tell it to clear the list. If I'm building something with AI, I really don't touch the code. If there is a bad pattern the code, I flag it in my task list and tell the AI to fix it.

Re: I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

#6

Post by bradfa »

Making production software is still hard. You still need to know what you're doing. Making good software still requires significant investment of time and intelligence.

Using LLM tools can greatly accelerate development when used effectively, it can enable much smaller high performing teams to be much more effective. But it's not magic and if you're holding it wrong it really can be a hindrance rather than a benefit.

Re: I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

#7

Post by InsideOutSanta »

smalltorch wrote: post #4

Were you using exclusively free plans to build your app? I didn't find app building to take that long, even without knowing the ins and outs of kotlin and swift. I did find the process of publishing the app to be one of the hardest things. The last 10 - 20 percent of app development still requires a lot of paperwork of you aren't already a developer.

If you read the article, you'll see that the author took the same approach one would use when writing an app manually from scratch:

> I started with a simple hello world application. Then added in the habit list, the ability to add a habit, edit a habit and so on.

This hands-on, incremental approach works, of course. But I don't think it is the most effective way of using LLMs to write apps.

Re: I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

#8

Post by gwbas1c »

> Spending your time cleaning up AI slop that you didn't want to write in the first place doesn't sound like much fun.

Pretty much every job I've had since 2003 involved cleaning up human-written slop.

For the moment, I'm finding that AI speeds up certain things: It can bang out unit tests in a few minutes, or do 80% of the work for me; but once it gets to the "test, make small change, test" loop, that's all done by hand.

Re: I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

#9

Post by InsideOutSanta »

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #5

So, how much was hand-written after the initial 6 hours? It sounds like quite a bit. My experience has been very different. I haven't gotten to the point of releasing anything from AI yet, but I'll spend a weekend throwing prompts, then I'll have an application that does the thing that I asked it to do. I'll use the application over the next week or so keeping a task list of things that I'd want to tweak, bugs, or fe…

Yeah, I think not manually fixing issues, but telling the LLM to fix them and update its own documentation to reflect the fix, is a somewhat unpleasant but necessary approach. Otherwise, the LLM is just going to make the same mistake again elsewhere, or randomly revert your change, or get confused.
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