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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

#71

Post by momentmaker »

I have similar experience as the author where I don't know the first thing about Swift but I was able to make my first iOS app[0] from start to finish on the initial release in about 3 weeks.

I think the hardest part was actually automating the release pipeline to directly upload to the App Store for a release with Test Flight.

It wouldn't have been possible without Claude's help.

Then next hard and tedious part was do a complete conversion to Android with Kotlin, which I also didn't have any experience either. That one-to-one parity was rather painful but it was done in about a month or so.

Now I just develop create features on the iOS version first and then do a parity match with the Android version after with Claude.

[0] https://github.com/walktalkmeditate/pilgrim-ios

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

#72

Post by bonesss »

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.

Elegance kinda-sorta has to be token efficient in the micro and the macro. Easier & better LLM results.

Aesthetic code is clear & consistent and therefore more readable. Supposedly we’re all awesome at PR review and use an aggressive process of manual review now, so readability should be a priority.

LLMs have context windows and compress them arbitrarily, inconsistent or messy areas of code can be read and improperly weighted in any given session, code base cleanliness gives consistency of generation.

… LLMs or not, I simply can’t imagine making a large(r) pile of crap for myself to maintain & customers to use in their businesses is some grand engineering benefit over time. If those agents are so great make ‘em do the entire job and refactor tested utility into a digestible & defensible product.

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

#73

Post by joshstrange »

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 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.

This right here!

I have very little issue with LLM-generated code, my issue is mostly with people throwing codebases over the fence, declaring it the best library/framework/app/platform/whatever and in 3 months I know the repo will say "Last commit 3 months ago".

Some things are "done" and don't need constant updates but most of the "bad" LLM code IMHO is the kind of stuff I know requires dedication (even if an LLM is writing all the code) and commitment to the library/etc for it to succeed.

If all you've done is vibe-coded something and aren't going to support it then I'll just vibe-code my own version tailor-made for my use-case that I can support myself.

I've thought about this a lot in relation to my side-business "could someone vibe code this?" and the answer is absolutely yes they could, but my customers don't come from me throwing code out into the world and walking away. My continued support, handling issues, being on-site for events (I make event-based software like food festivals) is where I provide the value. They've never once cared what the code looks like or how it works, it's the support they are really paying for. Someone to have the answers and track them down if they don't have the answer at their fingertips, that's the value I provide (and always have if I'm being honest).

Follow-through continues to be best way to achieve success IMHO.

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

#74

Post by jimrandomh »

The first thing to check for, in accounts like this, is "which AI model"? There is a subset of people who somehow don't realize how important that decision is, and don't mention or don't foreground which AI model they were using. This sort of person invariably gets much worse results out of AI, because they turn out to be using a shit-tier low-cost model instead of something that's actually good at what they're using it for.

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

#75

Post by erikwiffin »

malfist wrote: post #56
diskzero wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, its the stronglifts app. But I switched to hevy and I'm happy with it. But I did paper for a while and liked it until I missed mu graphs

Ugh, that happened to me too. But instead of researching other apps and waiting for them to decide to go premium too, I built my own workout app. Been using it for a couple months now and it's working great, but the hassle of publishing it to the app store means that it will only ever be a solution for me and I can't share it with anyone.

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

#76

Post by hn_submit »

agos wrote: post #68
feverzsj wrote: post #17

If there is "NO AI" certification, people will always choose such products.

"always" is a bit strong here.

No it isn't. I don't trust A.I. to generate maintainable and correct code and the people that use are too lazy or incompetent to write it themselves so I don't trust them either.

Ergo: I'd always go for "NO A.I. WAS USED IN CREATING THIS PROGRAM"

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

#77

Post by Denzel »

torginus wrote: post #32
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 infrastructur…

> keeping track of time and tasks

Amazing how many software engineers don't do this and continue to fool themselves into thinking they're faster with AI. If only more people would track and reflect on their time use.

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

#79

Post by ValentineC »

erikwiffin wrote: post #75
malfist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its the stronglifts app. But I switched to hevy and I'm happy with it. But I did paper for a while and liked it until I missed mu graphs

Ugh, that happened to me too. But instead of researching other apps and waiting for them to decide to go premium too, I built my own workout app. Been using it for a couple months now and it's working great, but the hassle of publishing it to the app store means that it will only ever be a solution for me and I can't share it with anyone.

Have you considered making it into a PWA?

I've always thought of cloning the old Zero fasting app into one, when I have a bit more time to point my Claude at building something else.

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

#80

Post by zem »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #51
oblio wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think any app should be built like this. Rather, I think this approach should be used when you already have a large codebase and are making atomic changes to it. In fact, I think taking this approach for greenfield work is more likely to result in slop because early accidental decisions turn into fundamental design choices. Instead, I've settled on a top-down approach: I write an in-depth spec for the whole a…

I write greenfield projects this way and have continued to do so with LLMs. it works very well if you have a decent idea of the architecture you are heading towards, and if you are willing to refector aggressively if you have a better idea.

to me the key point is that I get those better ideas a lot more readily by looking at the code than by planning up front - I have a good feel for when adding the next feature is harder than it should be, or when the resulting code is messier than I would like, and seeing the concrete code usually gives me the best idea for how exactly to improve it.

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