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Comment by webdever | Hacker News Reader

> it's amazing to use Claude to prompt an app into existence, and pretty frustrating when that app doesn't work right and Claude is all thumbs fixing the problem.

Such an in interesting sentence. App that doesn't work doesn't seem like it's yet come into existence.

This has been my (limited) experience so far. I haven't been able to get an AI/LLM to help me build an app. Even React apps it fails at. I have been able to get an LLM to help with coding questions similar to Stack Overflow questions though (though not always)

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You can replace "Claude" with any WYSIWYG no-code solution from back in the day like Dreamweaver or whatever and it's basically the same.

I know it's much more powerful than that tool was, but the experience described is similar between both

lol agreed, also I’m of the opinion that if you want a working app it’s much more frustrating to debug a heap of code generated by an AI than it is to build yourself (maybe with the help of AI, if you really need it). at least with the latter if you really built it yourself you understand all the components (to a certain abstraction point at least)

I've made a lot of apps with claude.e.g I made a pretty complex swiftui app recently even though I don't know swift. Usually you have to help Claude debug them and sometimes point it in the right direction.

Since the vast majority of Swift and SwiftUI documentation online is outdated, I've found that concatenating the best of "what's new in Swift 5.x / 6.x" blogs then asking it to organize that into a prompt for itself, then adding that to the system prompt, helps the LLM produce idiomatic and current code.

While these changes may require "new ways of thinking" in humans, the LLM seems to have these conceptual approaches embedded already thanks to other languages that did these things earlier. The what's new just shows it the syntax for these concepts in Swift.

The first pass often executes but the "thumbs" come in when you fix corner cases or iterate on it.

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