The codebase is old and really hard to work on. It’s a game that existed pre-iPhone and still has decent revenue but could use some updating. We intentionally shrank our company down to auto-pilot mode and frankly don’t even have a working development environment anymore.

It was basically cost prohibitive to change anything significant until Claude became able to do most of the work for us. My cofounder (also CTO of another startup in the interim) found himself with a lot of time on his hands unexpectedly and thought it would be a neat experiment and has been wowed by the results.

Much in the same way people on HN debate when we will have self driving cars while millions of people actually have their Teslas self-driving every day (it reminds me of when I got to bet that Joe Biden would win the election after he already did) those who think AI coding is years away are missing what’s happening now. It’s a powerful force magnifier in the hands of a skilled programmer and it’ll only get better.