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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

#31

Post by hutattedonmyarm »

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…

To add another datapoint: My weightlifting app used to be a one-time purchase a few years ago and have since switched to subscriptions. As a result I have received a lifetime pro license. They’re still selling lifetime licenses for almost a hundred dollars (yearly subscription is ~$30). I still have access to every pro feature. Not bad for a $5 I got ten years ago

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

#32

Post by torginus »

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…

I have noticed the exact behavior change on myself that you describe.

But, thanks to the magic of keeping track of time and tasks, I have discovered:

- I am not all that faster when project timelines are concerned

- I've often built things with AI with the latest and greatest technologies that I've always wanted to learn but never did, like write a microservice backend with the trendiest frameworks with infrastructure as code and all the bells and whistles, while previously I was content with a server executable sitting on disk (maybe in a container), writing to a sqlite db file next to it.

- The new tech has serious performance DX/UX and cost issues. While previously deployment was just a copy, now I have to wait for terraform to churn through the monstrosity I made with AI. Debugging is hard.

- There's no prestige in building with fancy tech. AI can build using microservice orchestration. It can build using a simple CRUD blob as well. You just have to ask it. A lot of appeal of said fancy tech lay in prestige, newness, and exclusivity, and it sucks in very tangible ways.

- I used to be much more awesome than I gave myself credit for. Looking back at my old code, the amount of highly dense and quality code I cranked out during my productive periods was way more than I though, and you could feel it was thought through. Rather than doing the feature sloppily then fixing the 5 corner cases, like AI does, I carefully considered execution flow and made sure the simple looking code actually did everything correctly. This meant that it had a ton of missing mental context that I couldn't replicate just by looking at it after a long while, and touching the code without rebuilding it was a futile exercise.

- I fooled myself into thinking I understood what AI was doing, but in reality, I was far less aware than I expected and needed to be

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

#33

Post by oblio »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #7
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.

> 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.

1. Which apps should be built like this?

2. Which apps shouldn't be built like this?

My instinct is that any app worth building and using for a long time should be built incrementally. Otherwise, slop.

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

#34

Post by Chance-Device »

oblio wrote: post #25
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.

> 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.

I don’t think you shouldn’t go and clean up dead code and ensure that you have code reuse, as it probably does help the LLM somewhat. I just don’t think that it needs to be as strict as we’re used to for human consumption. And the LLMs will get better at both reading such messy codebases and not making a mess as time goes on. Assuming of course, that not making a mess even helps.

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

#36

Post by dpoloncsak »

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.

I will say, when working with the recent batch of frontier models, even the last batch, if you ask "Do you think we should xyz" it may sometimes push back for an alternate solution.

Now, I can't promise it's advice is worth taking, but they do seem to be taking strides at judging the relevancy of some needless additions.

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

#37

Post by zedascouves »

ipunchghosts wrote: post #19

The authors experience is not mine. I have an app/website combo deployed that is getting 60+ visitors a day and the app is getting downloaded weekly. Both are growing. All "vibe" coded. Now I have 20 YOE in software too before the booon of AI.

same here. Did a timeslot management app for beauty salons etc. Tons of features, never once looked at source or even database (C#+pgsql)

The hard part were actually the sales but I'm getting quite some, going physically(!) to places.

Hosting costs $50, revenue is ~1k/month, nothing special but its basically on autopilot.

I did have the app for 6 months for free on a first client where they would give me feedback bugs etc until i felt it was stable.

I don't even have a pricing page, i try to see how much i get can from each client, from $5/mo to $100/mo

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

#39

Post by jstummbillig »

> If the AI bubble does ever pop, I am not sure there is going to be enough competent developers left who are willing to pick up the pieces.

There is so much confusion around "the AI bubble". I am sure a lot of things will deflate, fail, people will go out of business, model development might slow, people might lose money on hopeful 1000x investments – but not because from here on out we suddenly notice that AI capability was all just illusionary and we will not want it anymore.

In terms of capabilities, at the very least, what we now have will be here, forever. LLMs will be here, and they will be used, until something better comes along.

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

#40

Post by serial_dev »

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.

At least some of it (not all of it) will leak from devs pain to users pain... Untidy unaesthetic unreviewed code will sooner or later introduce inconsistencies, poor performance, and bugs, and as you get more of it, the harder it is to clean up properly and get things under control.
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