[efields]

In a week, Claude Code and I have built a PoC Rails App for a significant business use case. I intend to formally demo it for buy-in tomorrow after already doing a short "is this kind of what you're looking for?" walkthrough last week. From here, I intend to "throw it over the fence" for my staff, RoR and full-stack devs, to pick it apart and/or improve what they want to in order to bring it from 80-100% over the next two months. If they want to rewrite it from scratch, that's on the table.

It's not a ground-breaking app, its CRUD and background jobs and CSV/XLSX exports and reporting, but I found that I was able to "wireframe" with real code and thus come up with unanswered questions, new requirements, etc. extremely early in the project.

Does that make me a 10x engineer? Idk. If I wasn't confident working with CC, I would have pushed back on the project in the first place unless management was willing to devote significant resources to this. I.e. "is this really a P1 project or just a nice to have?" If these tools didn't exist I would have written spec's and excalidraw or Sketch/Figma wireframes that would have taken me at least the same amount of time or more, but there'd be less functional code for my team to use as a resource.

[OtherShrezzing]

If you think your CC wireframe has taken approx as much time as it'd have taken you with another tool like Figma + spec-writing, and one of your engineering team's options is "rewrite it from scratch" (without a spec), has the use of CC saved your company any time at all?

It reads like this project would have taken your company 9 weeks before, and now will take the company 9 weeks.

[g3f32r]

I think the comment was showing that the project takes 9 weeks either way, but coming to that determination was much more confident and convincing with a functional demo versus a hand-wavy figma + guesstimate.

[re-thc]

> was much more confident and convincing with a functional demo versus a hand-wavy figma + guesstimate.

Except it also blurs the lines and sets incorrect expectations.

Management often see code being developed quickly (without full understanding of the fine line between PoC and production ready) and soon they expect it to be done with CC in 1/2 the time or less.

Figma on the other hand makes it very clear it is not code.

[skydhash]

Which is why I like balsamiq. It looks like hand sketches but can be interactive. I can create any UI for brainstorming in a matter of minutes with it. Once the discussion is settled, we can move to figma for actual UI design (colors, spacing,…).

[coffeefirst]

Yeah. The prototyping is neat. But in past lives I would literally sketch the "POC" on paper.

I sort of want to get back to that... it was really good at getting ideas across.