alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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> AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly
Is it bad from a user or performance perspective, or just untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective? Because the developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.
I've been searching for the perfect notes app my whole life, and have been contemplating just building it myself now. I'd love if you could link me to your github and share it.
I have noticed the exact behavior change on myself that you describe.
But, thanks to the magic of keeping track of time and tasks, I have discovered:
- I am not all that faster when project timelines are concerned
- I've often built things with AI with the latest and greatest technologies that I've always wanted to learn but never did, like write a microservice backend with the trendiest frameworks with infrastructure as code and all the bells and whistles, while previously I was content with a server executable sitting on disk (maybe in a container), writing to a sqlite db file next to it.
- The new tech has serious performance DX/UX and cost issues. While previously deployment was just a copy, now I have to wait for terraform to churn through the monstrosity I made with AI. Debugging is hard.
- There's no prestige in building with fancy tech. AI can build using microservice orchestration. It can build using a simple CRUD blob as well. You just have to ask it. A lot of appeal of said fancy tech lay in prestige, newness, and exclusivity, and it sucks in very tangible ways.
- I used to be much more awesome than I gave myself credit for. Looking back at my old code, the amount of highly dense and quality code I cranked out during my productive periods was way more than I though, and you could feel it was thought through. Rather than doing the feature sloppily then fixing the 5 corner cases, like AI does, I carefully considered execution flow and made sure the simple looking code actually did everything correctly. This meant that it had a ton of missing mental context that I couldn't replicate just by looking at it after a long while, and touching the code without rebuilding it was a futile exercise.
- I fooled myself into thinking I understood what AI was doing, but in reality, I was far less aware than I expected and needed to be