I wanted to develop a simple tool to compare maps. I thought about using this opportunity to try out Claude AI for coding a project from scratch. It worked surprisingly well!

At least 95% of the code was generated by AI (I reached the limit so had to add final bits on my own).

What a feat! There's at least 3 pages of google search results for the nearly same thing. The "prompt" I used in google.com is:

site:github.com map comparison

I guess the difference, is that my way uses dramatically less time and resources, but requires directly acknowledging the original coders instead of relying on the plagiarism-ish capabilities of reguritating something through an LLM.

Claude is fantastic. I think the model itself is good enough to be able to write good software when competently directed; it's let down only by the UI/UX around it.

My only complaints are:

a) that it's really easy to hit the usage limit, especially when refactoring across a half dozen files. One thing that'd theoretically be easyish to fix would be automatically updating files in the project context (perhaps with an "accept"/"reject" prompt) so that the model knows what the latest version of your code is without having to reupload it constantly.

b) it oscillating between being lazy in really annoying ways (giving largeish code blocks with commented omissions partway through) and supplying the full file unnecessarily and using up your usage credits.

My hope is that Jetbrains give up on their own (pretty limited) LLM and partner with Anthropic to produce a super-tight IDE native integration.

I have about 6 months of coding experience. All I really knew was how to build a basic MERN app

I’ve been using Sonnet 3.5 to code and I’ve managed to build multiple full fledged apps, including paid ones

Maybe they’re not perfect, but they work and I’ve had no complaints yet. They might not scale to become the next Facebook, but not everything has to scale

For years I've kept a list of apps / ideas / products I may do someday. I never made the time, with Cursor AI I have already built one, and am working on another. It's enabling me to use frameworks I barely know, like React Native, Swift, etc..

The first prompt (with o1) will get you 60% there, but then you have a different workflow. The prompts can get to a local minimum, where claude/gpt4/etc.. just can't do any better. At which point you need to climb back out and try a different approach.

I recommend git branches to keep track of this. Keep a good working copy in main, and anytime you want to add a feature, make a branch. If you get it almost there, make another branch in case it goes sideways. The biggest issue with developing like this is that you are not a coder anymore; you are a puppet master of a very smart and sometimes totally confused brain.