I finally got to do something more extensive and serious with Claude Code / Gemini. It's basically a more complex CRUD app for multiple data entities, with some additional functionality.

I'm hoping that sharing my experience, amongst all others, can: A) help someone understand more / set their expectations B) get someone to point out how to do it better

On one hand, I managed, in 10 days, to get the amount of functionality would take ~2 months of coding "by hand". If I started the same project now - after learning, realising what works and not, and adapting - it would probably be possible in 5. The amount done was incredible - and it's working.

On the other hand:

- you need to be already very experienced in knowing how things should be built well, how they need to work together, and what is a good way to organize the user interface for the functionality

- you then need to have some practical experience with LLMs to know the limitations, and guide it through the above gradually, with proper level of detail provided and iteration. Which takes attention and process and time - it won't be a couple of sentences and hitting enter a couple of times, no matter how smart your prompts are

- otherwise, if you didn't think it through and planned it first, and did it with consideration of LLM itself, and you just give it high level requirements for an app with multiple functionalities - you'll just get a mess. You can try and improve your prompts over and over, and you'll get a different kind of mess every time, but mess nevertheless

- even with doing all of the above, you'll get a very very mediocre result in terms of "feeling of quality" - thoughtfulness of design, how information is laid out and things are organised - UX and polish. It might be more than fine for a lot of use-cases, but if you're building something that people need to use productively every day, it's not passable...

- the problem is that, at least in my experience, you can't get it to high level with LLM in an automated way - you still need to craft it meticulously. And doing that will require manually tearing down a lot of what LLM generated. And that way you'll still end up with something at least a bit compromised, and messy when it comes to code

In summary, it's amazing how far it's come and how much you can do quickly - but if you need quality, there's no going around it, you still need most of the effort and time do invest in it. Considering both together, I think it's still a great position to be in currently for people who can provide that needed level of quality - sometimes you can do things very easily and quickly and sometimes you do your proud work with a bit of assistance along the way.

I'm not sure until when that will work, or what happens later, or how does current state already bodes for less experienced people...