What are people doing with prototypes afterward? Do you end up shipping it as is to production? What about at work? Are the prototypes useful in that context?

I used Claude extensively during an internal hackweek at my company to prototype a new data analysis application. Probably would have never attempted the project without AI. Now it’s in production with more than 20k weekly users. Almost never use Claude to dev on it now, but it definitely helped me get off the ground.

I've started making most of my prototypes single HTML documents with inline CSS and JavaScript, because a single file is a lot easier to store somewhere and share and will probably keep on working forever (browsers are really good at backwards compatibility).

I chuck some of them on my public tools.simonwillison.net collection, others in their own GitHub repos with GitHub Pages enabled, and some I just share in a Gist (served via gisthost.github.io) or stick in a public S3 bucket so I have a URL for them.

If a prototype is against an existing project sometimes I'll leave it to silently rot in a branch on GitHub.

You know how when you finish prompting some code generator to build something, and you look over what it has built and feel a sense of emptiness even if it does what you want? I think about what I wish the prototype looked like, and basically start describing details that I expect to exist (think longer versions of e.g. “this should be using our internal graph library, and I figure we can model this task as a traversal, how far have you strayed from this and why?”) and let the agent analyze what it built against my expectations. I’ve spent hours in conversation just “refining the context” this way, and then I channel that into an update process. I figure the prototype is just about proving out behavior, and this next phase is about refining it into the pieces I’ll use elsewhere. It’s kinda fun, I’d absolutely burn out a coworker if I grilled their PRs the way I roast AI contributions :P

I use AI mostly to prototype features in my existing projects. If I have an idea, I use the AI to implement it and try out different ways in which it could be implemented. Then I throw away the code and mostly write the code manually, with AI used primarily for review or docs.

> What are people doing with prototypes afterward?

I think what people ARENT doing is interesting.

Usability isn't even in your list, it is not something most people even think of.

The best thing you can do with a prototype is give it to (potential) users and observe what they do with it. Just because you think that you're clearly communicating the intent of your system does not mean you are.