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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

#21

Post by malfist »

cube00 wrote: post #13

> There is an option to buy a lifetime licence but it costs a whopping £44.99. I've given up trusting lifetime anything from the app stores now. Mobile OSs seem to evolve so much faster, add new layers of security, lock pro features behind app store billing APIs that require the developer's account remains in good standing. I've been burnt by three apps cutting and running now. One where the developers got their priz…

My weightlifting app sold me a pro unlock to get weight calcualors years ago. Then they introduced a subscription model to get that plus some features I didn't want, they promised my purchase would be respected for all time.

Last September they declared that the app was "too valuable to give away for free" and told me I had to subscribe to use it. Even though it hadn't been free, I'd paid for it, and nothing about it had changed in the decade since I paid for it. Everything else was already locked behind a subscription I didn't find value in.

Seems like a lot of companies these days think "lifetime" means "until we really really want more money"

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

#22

Post by spprashant »

smalltorch wrote: post #15
spprashant wrote: post #11

I think we are moving from "can you build this product?" to "do i trust you to support this product?". Software is cheap, trust is a premium. Developers and companies who put real care into their product will come out on top. A large part of that is going to be, what not to build - something AI agents will always say yes to. To be fair, was always the case but its only going to be made more apparent as AI scales out.

What are the actual maintenance items you will run into for offline utilities if the initial version has been throughly tested and works exactly how you want it? Is it typically bug hunting on edge cases? Feature requests? If the initial product is polished enough, what can I realistically expect to run into down the line?

The OS changes all the time, Apple/Google stop supporting an API your app relied on, security vulnerabilities get published, even stupid stuff like timezone changes can break a perfect app in strange ways.

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

#23

Post by SoftTalker »

Chance-Device wrote: post #20
over_bridge wrote: post #14

I've used AI for building a hobbyist note app myself. It's also a mixed bag but a lot of that comes down to how I've changed. Before AI dev was expensive so I'd spend hours planning features. I filled 5 notebooks with UI sketches and data schemas and lists of names of what to call things. Building was more or less final as I only had 5-10 hrs a week max and wanted to move on. Now I type directly into the Claude Code…

> AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly Is it bad from a user or performance perspective, or just untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective? Because the developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.

Code that is untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective is also likely to be confusing to a user and perform or scale poorly, in my experience at least.

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

#24

Post by mvkel »

> This was just before Claude Code was released so this wasn't full agentic hands-off engineering. Instead, I broke down the development into lots of small tasks and went through them manually with the AI, testing each change as I went along

Is there really much use in deconstructing a vibe coding process that was used before the term "vibe coding" existed? It's like critiquing a caveman's fire-starting routine.

> Meanwhile, the senior developers are in 2 camps. One half are using AI for absolutely everything but are slowly losing their ability to code. The other half are so sick of AI and are getting burnt out having to write prompts every day that they just don't want to do it anymore.

Again, this sounds like what developers were saying about AI a year ago. The refrain from the development world hasn't sounded like that for a while.

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

#25

Post by oblio »

Chance-Device wrote: post #20
over_bridge wrote: post #14

I've used AI for building a hobbyist note app myself. It's also a mixed bag but a lot of that comes down to how I've changed. Before AI dev was expensive so I'd spend hours planning features. I filled 5 notebooks with UI sketches and data schemas and lists of names of what to call things. Building was more or less final as I only had 5-10 hrs a week max and wanted to move on. Now I type directly into the Claude Code…

> AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly Is it bad from a user or performance perspective, or just untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective? Because the developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.

> developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.

Until the LLM itself becomes confused by the 10 layers of old patterns that weren't fully deleted from the code base, 5 of which do more or less the same thing but in minutely different ways that cause issues.

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

#26

Post by oblio »

spprashant wrote: post #22
smalltorch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the actual maintenance items you will run into for offline utilities if the initial version has been throughly tested and works exactly how you want it? Is it typically bug hunting on edge cases? Feature requests? If the initial product is polished enough, what can I realistically expect to run into down the line?

The OS changes all the time, Apple/Google stop supporting an API your app relied on, security vulnerabilities get published, even stupid stuff like timezone changes can break a perfect app in strange ways.

Besides that, security cipher updates, internet protocol updates, there are a myriad ways applications that stand still can break.

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

#27

Post by arendtio »

mvkel wrote: post #24

> This was just before Claude Code was released so this wasn't full agentic hands-off engineering. Instead, I broke down the development into lots of small tasks and went through them manually with the AI, testing each change as I went along Is there really much use in deconstructing a vibe coding process that was used before the term "vibe coding" existed? It's like critiquing a caveman's fire-starting routine. > Me…

I am not exactly sure, but my gut feeling is that Cursor existed before Claude Code was released, and the term vibe coding existed already at that time.

EDIT: Okay, Andrej tweeted about Vibe Coding on February 3rd 2025, and Claude Code was released in the same month. But Cursor was already there (I can see usage starting January 2025 in my account and know that it took me a few weeks before I tried it).

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

#28

Post by diskzero »

malfist wrote: post #21
cube00 wrote: post #13

> There is an option to buy a lifetime licence but it costs a whopping £44.99. I've given up trusting lifetime anything from the app stores now. Mobile OSs seem to evolve so much faster, add new layers of security, lock pro features behind app store billing APIs that require the developer's account remains in good standing. I've been burnt by three apps cutting and running now. One where the developers got their priz…

My weightlifting app sold me a pro unlock to get weight calcualors years ago. Then they introduced a subscription model to get that plus some features I didn't want, they promised my purchase would be respected for all time. Last September they declared that the app was "too valuable to give away for free" and told me I had to subscribe to use it. Even though it hadn't been free, I'd paid for it, and nothing about it…

That is rough. I assume this is a web application?

I went through a previous thought experiment about what would happen when we moved a paid up front feature behind a subscription. This was the outcome I came to. Unless the user bought and installed a physical app, on the desktop, outside of an app store, they were going to get the rug pulled out from under them.

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

#29

Post by oblio »

bradfa wrote: post #6

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.

Powertools without safety features, basically.

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

#30

Post by Chance-Device »

SoftTalker wrote: post #23
Chance-Device wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly Is it bad from a user or performance perspective, or just untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective? Because the developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.

Code that is untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective is also likely to be confusing to a user and perform or scale poorly, in my experience at least.

I think these are separate things. I get the heuristic you’re applying, but with rigorous testing code quality doesn’t matter the same way anymore. Indeed, what is quality?
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