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Comment by hungryhobbit | Hacker News Reader

>A few hours used to get a programmer a script; now it gets a polished app, and it gets a non-programmer something instead of nothing.

I think "polished" is doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence.

Don't get me wrong: I literally spend every weekday generating web UIs with Claude: I'm not anti-AI at all.

But to claim anything Claude produces as "polished" means limiting yourself to a very narrow definition of that term! If it didn't, people like me wouldn't get paid six figure salaries still (we'd be replaced by the AI that produces "polished" code).

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Claude and Codex produce far more polished work than any of my side projects. Are they competitive with entire teams of professional developers working on standard (multi-week) project development schedules? I don't know. But it's weird to suggest that "unpolished" is their big problem.

If anything: too polished!

(Like the words in this blog post, by the way).

Polished turds maybe. Making something actually good (stable, intuitive, not lying to you in some way) still requires a lot of attention and effort.

Sure, of course it does. It's just different effort now.

Yes, that's my point.

The lack of polish is usually in the actual usability of the feature set (see yesterday's "polished photoshop clone" where the keyboard shortcuts just don't work)

I think you can use these tools to get something very polished. I have found that a lot of people get "tricked" into thinking that their result is good, but the people making these things and the people with expertise in the domain are often not that close to each other.

It is valuable for a thing to get used to figure out if it's actually any good.

Though the obvious glib thing is a lot of people build these tools and then don't use it.

(No not you, person who decides to reply to this saying 'but _I_ use it')

I'm sure it helps to have some design sense, or something. Whatever it is, I don't have it.

Each time I've tried to get some Web UI going with the AIs, they all look terrible. They may work, but, they're terrible. I know they're terrible. I can't really express why they're terrible, just that I don't like them. So, I cannot really explain to the AI why they're bad so they can fix it.

Its just a blindness of mine that I've had forever.

Give screenshots to Claude and ask for design review. Surprisingly effective. At this point opus 5.5 can do a lot with that exact type of feedback.

I keep trying this for very simple android apps and every pass between the Claude design tool and Claude code results in an uglier and less performant app. Woe is me, I have to actually learn this kotlin design / templating system.

oh, i haven't tried claude design. i just meant claude code in the terminal

I wouldn't read too much into it, as that sentence is also clearly AI juice.

Hard agree. Modern frontier models will give you a surprisingly solid first pass at a concept if prompted with a clear initial description and a handful of well-guided feature refinement rounds in an afternoon. That said, if you have a high bar for things like concise, well-architected codebases and strong, intuitive UX (the two main components of “polish” imo), you’ll find it takes a long time to get from Pareto-decent to truly polished.

I have taken to describing Claude as adding a veneer, not polish, which is exactly what makes it so insidious in the workplace when misapplied.

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