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

robertlagrant

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.

smalltorch

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.

Jeremy1026

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.

bradfa

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.

gwbas1c

> 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.

thenatureboy

Pretty sure I could bang this out in a day now w/ Claude/Codex.

spprashant

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.

cube00

> 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 prize jobs at Microsoft and AWS [1], another where they sold the app off to another company that gave up maintaining it [2] and finally EA (enough said) [3] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768909 [2]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/04/16/beyondpods-first-pu... [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190116224256/https://answers.e...

over_bridge

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.

feverzsj

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

Shorel

I tried building a real app with AI. It took a week or two. The problem lies in convincing other people to use it. So far I am the only user. And, this is not a new experience. 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 X 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 do these one-user apps. Welcome to my world :)

ipunchghosts

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.

mvkel

> This was just before Claude Code was released so this wasn't full agentic hands-off engineering. Instead, I broke down the development into lots of small tasks and went through them manually with the AI, testing each change as I went along Is there really much use in deconstructing a vibe coding process that was used before the term "vibe coding" existed? It's like critiquing a caveman's fire-starting routine. > Meanwhile, the senior developers are in 2 camps. One half are using AI for absolutely everything but are slowly losing their ability to code. The other half are so sick of AI and are getting burnt out having to write prompts every day that they just don't want to do it anymore. Again, this sounds like what developers were saying about AI a year ago. The refrain from the development world hasn't sounded like that for a while.

xnx

If you started to build an app today, it would take a month. Models and infrastructure are very different now.

lilerjee

Developing an app involves in many details, and AI cannot solve or think about all of them, many details will use default values, make up some values, or just left blank. The details are important. You shape the details, and the details shape you in turn as well.

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.

vanyaland

llms write bad core data sync code by default, so that icloud bug tracks. merge policies and conflict resolution i still end up doing by hand

alexpotato

I've spent a lot of time in my career as a SRE/DevOps which includes running MANY outages due to a combination of uncaught bugs and/or crazy infra failures. [0] In my opinion, the basics of software engineering haven't changed, it's just faster to write the code. e.g. the below plan is just applicable for humans or LLMs when building systems that are sensitive to small changes/errors and have catastrophic failure modes. (e.g. trading, avionics, health etc) 1. Have a very detailed plan of how you want it to work 2. Break the work into components 3. Work on each component and test the component extensively 4. Once that component is good, move on to the next component 5. Tie all those components together and confirm they work via integration tests etc There is a STRONG temptation to just tell the LLM "Build me a system" but that is a bad idea and was also a bad idea with humans. Sure, LLMs speed up #2 and possibly #3. For #3 specifically, almost all of the top developers I know are using LLMs to write the code but are writing the tests by hand or spending most of the time reviewing the test code written by LLMs. I would argue that this is how it should be. 0 - https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1215876962809339904

Ecsta

I made a simple app to solve a local/personal problem for people in my area. Keeping it focused made it fairly easy to get it built. I spent more time on the marketing website and images than I did building the actual app haha.

nullbio

Yep. AI will speed you up a bit, but it's no panacea.