alt Hacker NewsWould 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?
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The explanation is simple:
a) Speed - it included a lot of boring stuff, esp. in the beginning on when I was in the discovery phase and had to figure out some basics relevant for the context
b) I think I would have given up very early on, esp. of all these boring things, which are required but take long headache time to develop (e.g. The app has a somewhat complex data rendering component, containing hundres of GDI+ calls; the file is currently around 5000 lines, writing this by hand woul have taken very long and would have been very frustrating)
c) Debugging - Sometimes bugs are so deep down in some components and after 1h you stop seeing the forrest because of all single trees: The LLM can greatly help here
d) Fresh ideas: If there is a pyramid of know how in this niche, then Im currently working in "the first floor", basicly; discussions with the model about enhancing and more complex things helps to see the next island where you could swim
Yes, I could have done it without the models - but it would have taken sooo much much more time, that I wouldnt have taken the route.
Novelity: The app does one specific thing and is designed only for that specific usecase - I do not know how novel it is but since its a niche, maybe you could achieve the same thing with with existing solutions and their plugins (but then I would have had to learn how to edit/change those)
Background: 25y+ IT experience, Master degree and some other certs
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These models making bad / tasteless decisions about what dependencies to pull in is one of the main reasons they work best in the hands of experienced developers. You've got to know what you want it to use and tell it, and anticipate what shortcuts it will want to take and tell it not to do those things. For these reasons we're not yet at the point where inexperienced non-programmers can get high quality software out of these tools. I do think this will improve with time though.