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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend who has ZERO background in coding and he's basically built a SaaS app from the ground up using Replit and it's integration with Claude.

Backend is Supabase, auth done with Firebase, and includes Stripe integration and he's live with actual paying customers in maybe 2 weeks time.

He showed me his workflow and the prompts he uses and it's pretty amazing how much he's been able to do with very little technical background. He'll get an initial prompt to generate components, run the code, ask for adjustments, give Claude any errors and ask Claude to fix it, etc.

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o1-preview built me an iOS app that is now in the app store. It only took me about 3 hours of back and forth with it go from very basic to adding 10 - 20 features, and it didn't break the existing code when refactoring for new features. It also generates code with very little of the cruft that I would expect to see reviewing PRs from human coders. I've got 25 years build / deploying / running code at every size company from startup to FAANG, and I'm completely blown away how quickly it was able to help me take a concept in my head to an app ready to put in front of users and ask them to pay for (I already have over 3,000 sales of the app within 2 weeks of releasing).

My next step is to ask it to rewrite the iOS app into an Android app when I have a block of time to sit down and work through it.

That's interesting. Could you share the name of the app?

Wow that's super impressive. I need to stop making excuses and being afraid of doing big side projects with this many tools at my disposal.

I wrote a Blackjack simulator using 90% LLM as a fun side project.

https://github.com/mmichie/cardsharp

Awesome, will take a look!

I have big issues with the AI code. It is often so bad that I can’t stand it and would never release something like that when I know is so poor quality.

Yea, but the fact you can recognize bad code makes it even better. You could probably eliminate so many tedious tasks that are involved with building POCs. Just generate and iterate with your expertise.

You already have the full picture in your head, why not get there faster?

Has he shared this workflow anywhere (i.e., YouTube)? I’d be very curious to see how it works.

No; not at the moment. I've been trying to get him to create some content along the way because it's so interesting, but he's been resistant (not because he doesn't want to share; more like he's too heads down on the product).

Ask him in a year how maintenance went

The whole thing is literally stapled together right now -- and he knows it, but he's got paying users and validated the problem. If he's at it for a year, it won't matter: it means he'll be making money and can either try to get funded or may be generating enough revenue to rebuild it.

Hiring people to maintain AI-generated dross is not easy. Try it.

You'd be surprised.

I worked at a YC startup two years back and the codebase at the time was terrible, completely unmaintainable. I thought I fixed a bug only to find that the same code was copy/pasted 10x.

They recently closed on a $30m B and they are killing it. The team simply refactored and rebuilt it as they scaled and brought on board more senior engineers.

Engineering type folks (me included) like to think that the code is the problem that needs to be solved. Actually, the job of a startup is to find the right business problem that people will pay you to solve. The cheaper and faster you can find that problem, the sooner you can determine if it's a real business.

Sounds like a job for... AI.

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