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1zael 4 days ago

I've literally built the entire MVP of my startup on Claude Code and now have paying customers. I've got an existential worry that I'm going to have a SEV incident that will trigger a house of falling cards, but until then I'm constantly leveraging Claude for fixing security vulnerabilities, implementing test-driven-development, and planning out the software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap. I hope this story becomes more and more common as time passes.

ComputerGuru 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> but until then I'm constantly leveraging Claude for fixing security vulnerabilities

That it authored in the first place?

dpe82 4 days ago | parent [-]

Do you ever fix your own bugs?

janice1999 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Humans have the capacity to learn from their own mistakes without redoing a lifetime of education.

ComputerGuru 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Bugs, yes. Security vulnerabilities? Rarely enough that it wouldn’t make my HN list. It’s not remotely hard to avoid the most common issues.

fluidcruft 3 days ago | parent [-]

Granted I've only been using Claude for a short time, but in my experience it tends to write code that matches the style of the code it's editing. Which is sort of a "no duh" thing in retrospect but I hadn't considered that. That is to say old crappy code I wrote long ago when I was dumber gets old-crappy dumber code style suggestions from Claude. And newer better-practices code that is very careful gets Claude to follow that style as well.

It wasn't something I considered at first but it makes sense if you think about text prediction models and infilling and training by reading code. The statistics of style matching what you are doing against similar things. You're not going to paint a photorealistic chunk into a hole of an impressionist painting, ya know?

So in my experience if you give it "code that avoids the common issues" that works like a style it will follow. But if you're working with a codebase that looks like it doesn't "avoid those common issues" I would expect it to follow suit and suggest code that you would expect from codebases that don't "avoid those common issues". If the input code looks like crappy code, I would expect it to statistically predict output code that looks like crappy code. And I'm not talking about formatting (formatting is for formatters), it's things like which functions and steps are used to accomplish whatever. That sort of thing. At least without some sort of specific prompting it's not going to jump streams.

Edit: one amusing thing you can do is ask Claude to predict attributes of the developers of the code and their priorities and development philosophy (i.e. ask Claude to write a README that includes these cultural things). I have a theory it gives you an idea about the overall codesmell Claude is assigning to the project.

Again I am very new to these tools and have only used claude-code because the command line interface and workflow didn't make me immediately run for the hills the way other things have. So no idea how other systems work, etc because I immediately bounced on them in the past. My use of claude-code started as an "okay fine why not give these things the young guns can't shut up about a shot on the boring shit and maybe clear out some backlog" for making chores in projects that I usually hate doing at least a little interesting but I've expanded my use significantly after gaining experience with it. But I have noticed it behave very differently in different code bases and the above is how I currently interpret that.

ComputerGuru 2 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks for sharing; that sounds rather reasonable. But I was under the impression that this new "vibe coding" thing was where you start with a "clean slate" altogether (the llm itself generates/picks the "initial state" in terms of idiomatic or not-so-idiomatic handling of whatever conditions rather than copying it from existing code)?

fluidcruft 2 days ago | parent [-]

I haven't tried any of that sort of thing yet... but I would expect the prompt to probably colors expectations.

Overall "meta" commands seem to work much more effectively that I expected. I'm still getting used to it and letting it run more freely lately but there's some sort of a loop you can watch as it runs where it will propose code given logic that is dumb and makes you want to stop it and intervene... but on the next step it evaluates what it just wrote and rejects for the same reason I would have rejected it and then tries something else. It's somewhat interesting to watch.

If you asked a new "I need you to write XYZ stat!" vs "We care a lot about security, maintainability and best practices. Create a project that XYZ." you would expect different product from the new hire. At least that's how I am treating it.

Basically I would give it a sort of job description. And you can even do things like pick a project you like as a model and have it write a file describing development practices used in that project. Then in the new project ask it to refer to that file as guidance and design a plan for writing the program. And then let it implement that plan. That would probably give a good scaffold, but I haven't tried. It seems like how I would approach that right now as an experiment. It's all speculation but I can see how it might work.

Maybe I'll get there and try that, but at the moment I'm just doing things I have wanted to do forever but that represented massive amounts of my time that I couldn't justify. I'm still learning to trust it and my projects are not large. Also I am not primarily a programmer (physicist who builds integrations, new workflows and tools for qc and data handling at a hospital).

imiric 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, don't be shy, share what CC helped you build.

1zael 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Answered above, but to be concrete on features --> it helped me build an end-to-end multi-stage pipeline architecture for video and audio transcription, LLM analysis, content generation, and evals. It took care of stuff like Postgres storage and pgvector for RAG-powered semantic search, background job orchestration with intelligent retry logic, Celery workers for background jobs, and MCP connectors.

dimgl 3 days ago | parent [-]

We get it; it helped you build a bunch of stuff. Why not just post your company?

1zael 3 days ago | parent [-]

We're in the govtech x AI space (building software for local governments and government-adjacent customers). I don't feel comfortable linking my direct startup yet - it serves me no benefit here (I just get judged by a bunch of angry programmers) and we're in the middle of fundraising with investors.

bopbopbop7 3 days ago | parent [-]

Then why bring it up in the first place if you’re not even willing to show one shred of evidence of your vibe coding output, even a link to you companies landing page?

orsorna 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

Workaccount2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I learned 20 years ago to never share code online with programmers when it comes to making a point (or, sadly, asking for help.)

I promise if someone posted human made code and said it was LLM generated, it would still be nit-picked to death. I swear 75% of developers ride around on a high horse that their style of doing things is objectively the best and everyone else is a knuckle dragger.

turnsout 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There’s still a stigma. I think people are worried that if it gets out that their startup was built with the help of an LLM, they’ll lose customers who don’t want to pay for something “vibe coded.”

Honestly I don’t think customers care.

mlrtime 3 days ago | parent [-]

I used the analogy to how online dating started. I remember [some] people were embarrassed to say they met online so would make up a story. We're in that phase of AI development, it will pass.

jaggederest 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I generally work as openly as possible on github, and I am deliberately avoiding manual coding for a while to try to learn these (infuriating/wonderful) tools more thoroughly.

Unfortunately I can't always share all of my work, but everything on github after perhaps 2025-06-01 is as vibe-coded as I can get it to be. (I manually review commits before they're pushed, and PRs once in a complete state, but I always feed those reviews back into the tooling, not fix them manually, unless I get completely fed up.)

bopbopbop7 3 days ago | parent [-]

Everyone wants to see your very profitable startup, it’s simply free advertising. Why not share it?

jaggederest 3 days ago | parent [-]

I definitely don't have a very profitable startup. I'm simply a working programmer trying to learn new tools.

davepeck 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I've literally built the entire MVP of my startup on Claude Code and now have paying customers.

Would you mind linking to your startup? I’m genuinely curious to see it.

(I won’t reply back with opinions about it. I just want to know what people are actually building with these tools!)

bopbopbop7 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

He won’t, everyone that says they made a profitable startup with some AI code generator 3000 never seems to link their startup. Interesting.

davepeck 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are many reasons that "I used AI to do it all and now I've got $REAL ARR" strikes me as unlikely. To name just two:

1. I code with LLMs (Copilot, Claude Code). Like anyone who has done so, I know a lot about where these tools are useful and where they're hopeless. They can't do it all, claims to the contrary aside.

2. I've built a couple businesses (and failed tragicomically at building a couple more). Like anyone who has done so, I know the hard parts of startups are rarely the tech itself: sales, marketing, building a team with values, actually listening to customers and responding to their needs, making forward progress in a sea of uncertainty, getting anyone to care at all... sheesh, those are hard! Last I checked, AI doesn't singlehandedly solve any of that.

Which is not to say LLMs are useless; on the contrary, used well and aimed at the right tasks, my experience is that they can be real accelerants. They've undoubtedly changed the way I approach my own new projects. But "LLMs did it all and I've got a profitable startup"... I mean, if that's true, link to it because we should all be celebrating the achievement.

1zael 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We're in the govtech x AI space (building software for local governments and government-adjacent customers). I don't feel comfortable linking my direct startup yet - it serves me no benefit here (I just get judged by a bunch of angry programmers) and we're in the middle of fundraising.

jaggederest 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My github has examples of work I've done recently that are open source.

I'm deliberately trying not to do too much manual coding right now so I can figure out these (infuriating/wonderful) tools.

davepeck 3 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks, I’ll take a look. Everyone uses these tools differently, so I find AI-generated repos (and AI live-coding streams) to be useful learning material.

FWIW: “Infuriating/wonderful” is exactly how I feel about LLM copilots, too! Like you, I also use them extensively. But nothing I’ve built (yet?) has crossed the threshold into salable web services and every time someone makes the claim that they’ve primarily used AI to launch a new business with paid customers, links are curiously absent from the discussion… too bad, since they’d be great learning material too!

jaggederest 3 days ago | parent [-]

I will have one for you, most likely, later this week! Fingers crossed anyway!

lajisam 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“Implementing test-driven development, and planning out software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap” can you give some concrete examples of how CC helped you here?

1zael 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, so I continuously maintain a claude.md file with the feature roadmap for my product (which changes every week but acts as a source of truth). I feed that into a claude software architecture agent that I created, which reviews proposed changes for my current feature build against the longer-term roadmap to ensure I don't 1\ create tech debt with my current approach and 2\ identify opportunities to parallelize work that could help with multiple upcoming features at once.

I have also a code reviewer agent in CC that writes all my unit and integration tests, which feeds into my CI/CD pipeline. I use the "/security" command that Claude recently released to review my code for security vulnerabilities while also leveraging a red team agent that tests my codebase for vulnerabilities to patch.

I'm starting to integrate Claude into Linear so I can assign Linear tickets to Claude to start working on while I tackle core stuff. Hope that helps!

lifestyleguru 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

duh, I ordered Claude Code to simply transfer money monthly to my bank account and it does.

foobarbecue 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I hope this story becomes more and more common as time passes.

Why????????????

Why do you want devs to lose cognaizance of their own "work" to the point that they have "existential worry"?

Why are people like you trying to drown us all in slop? I bet you could replace your slop pile with a tenth of the lines of clean code, and chances are it'd be less work than you think.

Is it because you're lazy?

1zael 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Congratulations, you replace my pile of "slop" (which really is functional, tight code written by AI in 1/1000th of the time it would take me to write it) with your "shorter" code that has the exact same functionality and performance. Congrats? The reality is no one (except in the case of like competitive programming) cares about the length of your code so long as it's maintainable.

foobarbecue 3 days ago | parent [-]

But that's the thing -- because I WROTE my code, I know there's nothing bizarre in it. Your code is almost guaranteed to have something bizarre and unexpected in it, at least somewhere.

BeetleB 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I bet you could replace your slop pile with a tenth of the lines of clean code, and chances are it'd be less work than you think.

Actually, no. When LLMs produce good, working code, it also tends to be efficient (in terms of lines, etc).

May vary with language and domain, though.

stavros 4 days ago | parent [-]

Eh, when is that, though? I'm always worrying about the bugs that I haven't noticed if I don't review the changes. The other day, I gave it a four-step algorithm to implement, and it skipped three of the steps because it didn't think they were necessary (they were).

BeetleB 4 days ago | parent [-]

Hmm...

It may be the size of the changes you're asking for. I tend to micromanage it. I don't know your algorithm, but if it's complex enough, I may have done 4 separate prompts - one for each step.

foobarbecue 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't it easier to just write the code???

BeetleB 4 days ago | parent [-]

Depends on the algorithm. When you've been coding for a few decades, you really, really don't want to write yet another trivial algorithm you've written multiple tens of times in your life. There's no joy in it.

Let the LLM do the boring stuff, and focus on writing the fun stuff.

Also, setting up logging in Python is never fun.

foobarbecue 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Right-- it's only really capable of trivial code and boilerplate, which I usually just copy from one of my older programs, examples in docs, or a highly-ranked recent SO answer. Saves me from having to converse with an expensive chatbot, and I don't have to worry about random hallucinations.

If it's a new, non-trivial algorithm, I enjoy writing it.

BeetleB 3 days ago | parent [-]

For me, it's a lot easier getting the LLM to do it than browsing through multiple SO answers, or even finding some old code of mine.

Oh, and the chatbot is cheap. I pay for API usage. On average I'm paying less than $5 per month.

> and I don't have to worry about random hallucinations.

For boilerplate code, I don't think I've ever had to fix anything. It's always worked the first time. If it didn't, my prompt was at fault.

Mallowram 2 days ago | parent [-]

The reason it is code and not glyphs that summarize boilerplated function is to keep the chance for innovation open. Once the code becomes automated to this scale, it indicates the language is dying.

AI is simply automated undertaking, not advancement. Look big picture, not small-minded expediency.

a5c11 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Also, setting up logging in Python is never fun.

import logging

BeetleB 3 days ago | parent [-]

Not fun at all.

Configuring it to produce useful stuff (e.g. timestamps, autologging exceptions, etc). Very boilerplate and tedious.

stavros 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It was really simple, just traversing a list up and down twice. It just didn't see the reason why, so it skipped it all (the reason was to prevent race conditions).

Mallowram 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

second

PUSH_AX 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Clean code? Fewer lines? Found the intermediate.