alt Hacker NewsThis is what I've found and would likely be the consenses of the HN community.
This has lowered the barrier of entry for many non-SWEs. I'm primarily a data scientist myself in the environmental sector with limited front end development.
My partner proposed an idea to help manage her horses and over the course of several weeks we fleshed out an android app that would enable/assist her with horse care.
I spent a few days in planning mode pointing claude to the services we want to utilise and the functionality.
We now have a fully developed app that we are testing but found several features missing. For example, Claude implement X but without a level of verbosity it failed to implement the edit/deletion of X.
The app is highly tailored to her use case and I had already built the main parts as a POC but she had no user-friendly method to interact with the information she required. Claude made this possible in such a quick time frame that just seems insane. As someone time poor (as most horse people are), it would have taken me a year+ to produce something unpolished when compared to what Claude produced.
Replies
Question if you don't mind. Would you have considered outsourcing the application you mentioned? As in, paying someone else to do it?
To me it is great that LLMs are allowing more people to use computers and software the way they were meant to. But the people that are using them this way, in my opinion, wouldn't have commissioned anybody to do it anyway. They'd just live with whatever process/pain they have. So jumping from "I can now produce a prototype in a weekend" to "software development is dead" has always felt strange to me. Just something I've been thinking about lately.
> We now have a fully developed app that we are testing but found several features missing.
This is my experience with using AI to generate tailored apps too. The first 80% makes me really excited but then it either only kind of works, has bugs, or has missing features. Even when I do eventually get it working I feel dirty using it because I just know it's badly implemented. Of the dozens I've created I don't think I still use any of them. I have a few glue scripts still in use.
this is why i think LLMs is a foundational technology like the Internet. there is no other technology on the horizon that have this much impact.
> We now have a fully developed app that we are testing but found several features missing.
So not fully developed then.