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Comment by shane_kerns | Hacker News Reader

This is a great piece of software, with much thought put into nitty gritty details. Aside from the gripes around the mobile experience that some have outlined here, I would say you've put much thought into this piece of software. Your wife is lucky that she has a talented software developer for a husband. AI or no AI, I think this is a very clean and beautiful piece of software. This doesn't seem like its Vibe coded, because AI doesn't write such clean code but maybe AI is improving and I'm just bad at telling which is which. Nonetheless, keep up the great work and thanks for sharing. I'm downloading it just to learn from your codebase. Its not like before AI came around talented devs didn't create working side projects to help their loved ones out.

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The truth is that I put a lot of work in at the beginning to define the data structure and flows by myself. AI was very useful later to experiment with how to build the views on top of it and to fix some issues.

I still had to think hard about how to make this simple and easy for someone who does not have deep knowledge of this manufacturing domain.

*Lessons learned:*

  1. Data structure is almost everything, then comes business logic
  2. You must have deep domain knowledge of what you are building
  3. Iterate fast on the views built on top of the data structure

*PS*

All mobile fixed had been resolved and deployed ;)

#1 reminds me of my favourite software quote:

"Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks

AI will write whatever kind of code you want it to write. If you know how to write clean code and you can describe that in a prompt, it will give you clean code that is indistinguishable from that of a talented dev.

> If you know how to write clean code.

If we're assuming that:

I find it less time consuming to just write the code, understand it 99% (since I wrote it), and debug the rest, than it is to try to describe it to the AI, understand a fraction of what it spits out, and spend more time understanding it and fixing it.

If you can just write clean code just do that. Also, you will improve your skills even more the more you do that (shocker). So the next time you have to do that it will be even easier. This is called learning a skill.

Sorry for the rough tone, reading that back haha. But still posting because I'm just passionate about it, it's nothing personal though.

Reading is much faster than writing, that's a given. You can generate the rules in less than an hour, then never have to write a line of code again.

But maybe you have trouble writing prompts. Spend some time learning how to do that and it will be even easier. It's a skill ;)

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