[elliotec]

Better start now! It’s incredible and unbelievable how productive it is. In my opinion it still takes someone with a staff level of engineering experience to guide it through the hard stuff, but it does in a day with just me what multiple product teams would take months to do, and better.

I’m building a non-trivial platform as a solo project/business and have been working on it since about January. I’ve gotten more done in two nights than I did in 3 months.

I’m sure there are tons of arguments and great points against what I just said, but it’s my current reality and I still can’t believe it. I shelled out the $100/mo after one night of blowing through the $20 credits I used as a trial.

It does struggle with design and front end. But don’t we all.

[petetnt]

Designers and frontend developers don’t struggle with those. That’s why they are designers and frontend developers.

Before those 3 months you mentioned, how much did you spend time coding on average (at work, or as a hobby) percentagewise?

[elliotec]

Of course they do. I’ve been primarily a front end developer for 15 years. Working with designers. Shit takes so many iterations and so much time. Claude is faster but still “struggles” compared to basic rails work and API calls and test writing and whatnot.

I’m not sure how to answer the question on percentage of time coding. I quit my job as a director where coding wasn’t part of the job but have kept up on side stuff and architecture at work. Since the new year when I started this it’s been in bursts, some weeks or nights I’ll go super hard coding and others I’ll focus on other stuff. I go to conferences and study a lot on the subject of the industry so that’s what I do in bursts of the non-coding time.

I hired a virtual assistant to help with the non-coding things so lately it’s been a lot more.

In general I’d estimate at least 50% of my work on this thing since January has been coding but it’s really hard to gauge. Claude over the past 3 days has surpassed my personal coding productivity over the past 3 months though, if it wasn’t clear what I was saying.

[john2x]

Will these kinds of software end up like a programs written with bespoke Lisp macros? Lots of power but only one person actually knows it by heart.

[scuff3d]

Hit me up when you release your product. I keep seeing stuff like this and never see any proof. Companies aren't releasing 10x the features/patches/bug fixes/products, open source isn't getting 10x the number of quality PRs, absolutely no real evidence that the massive productivity gains actually exist.

What I've seen is people feel more productive, until the reality of all the subtle problems start to set in. Even skilled engineers usually only end up with 10 or 20% productivity gains by the time they reduce its usecase to where it's actually not total dog shit, or by the time they go back around and fix all the problems.

The highest quality product I know of where the creator has talked about his use of AI is ghostty, and he's not claiming massive improvements, just that it's definitely helpful.

[elliotec]

I’ll happily let you know when I release. Goal date for public beta is the 15th. I’d love eyes and feedback on it ASAP.

Hopefully it’s obvious that Claude will not have simply written the entire thing but you might get a sense of what it can do quickly as part of a whole - maybe similar to your last sentence but I suppose I am claiming massive improvements (in productivity, no warranty on quality yet).

Also keep in mind I’m entirely solo here. I fully agree with your points that the proof is in the pudding and obviously there’s nuance to all of it. But yeah, I’m not exaggerating with my commentary above.

[scuff3d]

If you don't mind me asking a couple questions, what percentage of your code would you say is AI generated, meaning you promoted an AI and it went off and wrote code that you used (with or without modification)?

And how much time would you say you spend wrangling the AI, meaning either repromting or substantially editing what you get back?