alt Hacker News++1
Was able to build a large financial application just with the 20 USD subscription in the last 12 month - without Claude, I would have required 5 - 6 people and at least 1 year of funding.
This was by far my best investment in my whole life 12x20 USD vs. 750.000 salary :-)
It is especially inspiring since it brings you usually a few new ideas into your context; also just joking around with it can yield new inspirations.
I'm wondering how long it will stay at 20 USD for the smallest subscription, no chance that they can keep this price, I'd say? Its impressive that they are giving it away for nearly free.
Replies
Are you using this large financial application just for yourself?
I think the difficult task is/will be to sell vibe coded software from the lone developer to anyone.
Would you have needed 6 people? I find that Claude, Codex etc. are able to output so much because they do a lot of reinventing the wheel whereas a human, given constraints, would make much more pragmatic choices around which technology to use. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and regardless, you’ve been able to achieve something you’re happy with, which is what matters. But, I’d still like to hear more about what it has done that you think you couldn’t have done in a year yourself by choosing existing technologies. E.g: what is novel in your application? What background do you have?
What is this app and what does it do? Can we see it?
I find it very hard to believe anyone could code anything complicated with Claude that 5-6 competent developers could do.
I am currently working on a relatively complicated UI on an internal tool and Claude constantly just breaks it. I tried asking it to build it step by step, adding each functionality I need piece by piece. But the code it eventually got was complete garbage. Each new feature it added would break an existing one. It was averse to refactoring the code to make it easier to add future features. I tried to point it in the right direction and it still failed.
It got to the point where I took a copy of the code, cut it back to basics and just wrote it myself. I basically halved the amount of code it wrote, added a couple of extra features and it was human readable. And if I started with this, it would have took less time!
Can you provide a link to this app? Or alternately, share a few of the prompts by which you built it? I only ask because, if it's really that easy/simple, I'd like to do the same thing!
I find this baffling tbh as I regularly ask Claude for basic components and they come out completely broken, wrong and buggy.
The last: I asked for a quick TCP server in C++ that handled just a single client (disconnecting the existing client when a new client connected), with a send() that I could call from another thread. It was holding mutexes over read(), and trying to set the SO_REUSEPORT port socket option on a socket that had already been bound. Subtley broken garbage.
It would literally be better to copy and paste a solution off Stack Overflow, because at least there's a chance it'd have been reviewed by someone who knows what they're doing.