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 chat box and it writes it in front of me. I haven't planned a thing in months. As a result the app swings wildly around based on my whims and feelings. I can rewrite the whole thing based on something I thought of in the shower. Then days later I realize it isn't right and I rebuild it again. All of the rewrites have done a number on the code and I see dead patterns everywhere from stuff long since deleted.
In a professional app I'd have others to hold me accountable so it's not exactly the same but AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly. If you know exactly what you want though it can feel like magic.
I just hope it's still respecting the data loading and caching algorithms I designed so carefully cause I wouldn't know if it wasn't anymore.
> 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.
> 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 two apps cutting and running now. One where the developers got jobs at Microsoft and AWS [1] and another where they sold the app off to another company that gave up maintaining it [2]
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not apparent if these were exclusively free LLMs though. I still don't quite understand the time scale unless the author didnt pay...which would be really impressive
I tried building a real app with AI. It took a week. Maybe two weeks.
The problem lies in convincing other people to use it. So far I am the only user.
And, this is not something new. I have a utility to change the gamma ramp in a GPU, for windows, that still works in Windows 98, XP, 10, and 11, even Linux and Window with Wine, and so far I am the only user.
I wrote it because I had an old CRT that was too dark and unusable with the default gamma.
So now everyone can create these one user apps. Welcome to my world :)
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.
> 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.
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 chat box and it writes it in front of me. I haven't planned a thing in months. As a result the app swings wildly around based on my whims and feelings. I can rewrite the whole thing based on something I thought of in the shower. Then days later I realize it isn't right and I rebuild it again. All of the rewrites have done a number on the code and I see dead patterns everywhere from stuff long since deleted.
In a professional app I'd have others to hold me accountable so it's not exactly the same but AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly. If you know exactly what you want though it can feel like magic.
I just hope it's still respecting the data loading and caching algorithms I designed so carefully cause I wouldn't know if it wasn't anymore.
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.
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 two apps cutting and running now. One where the developers got jobs at Microsoft and AWS [1] and another where they sold the app off to another company that gave up maintaining it [2]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768909
[2]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/04/16/beyondpods-first-pu...
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
The problem lies in convincing other people to use it. So far I am the only user.
And, this is not something new. I have a utility to change the gamma ramp in a GPU, for windows, that still works in Windows 98, XP, 10, and 11, even Linux and Window with Wine, and so far I am the only user.
I wrote it because I had an old CRT that was too dark and unusable with the default gamma.
So now everyone can create these one user apps. Welcome to my world :)
Now I have 20 YOE in software too before the booon of AI.
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.