alt Hacker NewsThe gap is definitely real. But I think most of this thread is misdiagnosing why it exists. It's not that AI cannot produce production quality code, it's that the very mental model most people have of AI is leading them to use the wrong interaction model for closing that last 20% of complexity in production code bases.
The author accidentally proved it: the moment they stopped prompting and opened Figma to actually design what they wanted, Claude nailed the implementation. The bottleneck was NEVER the code generation, it was the thinking that had to happen BEFORE ever generating that code. It sounds like most of you offload the thinking to AFTER the complexity has arisen when the real pattern is frontloading the architectural thinking BEFORE a single line of code is generated.
Most of the 100-hour gap is architecture and design work that was always going to take time. AI is never going to eliminate that work if you want production grade software. But when harnessed correctly it can make you dramatically faster at the thinking itself, you just have to actually use it as a thinking partner and not just a code monkey.
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I don't know how other people work, but writing the code for me has been essential in even understanding the problem space. The architecture and design work in a lot of cases is harder without going through that process.
Absolutely. You need to treat it like a real program from the very beginning.
YES YES YES!! I so wish that we could go back in time and never, ever have even suggested anything other that what you say here. AI doesn't do it for you. It does it with you.
You have to figure out what you want before the AI codes. The thinking BEFORE is the entire game.
Though I will also say that I use Claude for working out designs a lot. Literally hours sometimes with long periods of me thinking it through.
And I still get a ton more done and often use tech that I would never have approached before these glory days.
Yeah, communicating what you want can be hard.
I'm doing a simple single line text editor, and designing some frame options. Which has a start end markers.
This was really hard to get the LLM to do right.. until just took a pen and paper, drew what I wanted, took a photo and gave it to the llm