Tell us more. What I'm gathering from your comment is that you have a personal monster project (500k LOC) fully/mostly developed by AI and you're having no problems maintaining it. Can you understand anything in the codebase? Has the maintenance cost (in AI tokens) been going up as the project keeps growing? Are users happy?

Also, sharing a link would be great if you're comfortable with the idea.

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user43928 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, I'm not comfortable linking my HN account to my name and home address.

I'm still in the process of launching the app, it went live just two weeks ago. So far only 30 users, I have not yet started the ad campaign.

Basically I don't look at the codebase at all, I have long stopped using the IDE or doing code reviews.

From a product perspective, there have been no big surprises. Only once I was surprised to see a feature I thought I implemented only on a specific screen being available on a different screen too, hidden behind a drag gesture, spawning an UI component I totally did not expect.

While that seems like a loss of control, it's not too different from enterprise work with many contributors where I am also not aware of all changes.

About maintenance cost, no, I do not think so. It generally became easier over time since Opus 5.5 delivers better results than GPT-5.5 did.

From a token perspective, a large part of the resources go into translating to 30 languages and checking the screenshots for layout regressions.

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lewispollard 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm still in the process of launching the app, it went live just two weeks ago.

Sorry, but at this point you have no idea what the maintenance looks like.

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user43928 11 hours ago | parent [-]

You think that after my 500h of work and daily usage of my own app, I have no idea about what maintenance looks like.

Can you explain to me how I would develop the project for 7 months and grow the codebase to 500k LOC without maintaining it at all?

The argument seems nonsensical to me, but I've been getting that comment a few times on HN.

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hologramofham 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You think that after my 500h of work and daily usage of my own app, I have no idea about what maintenance looks like.

At 30 users you have no idea what maintenance looks like. That's literally what maintenance is - responding to real world usage.

Come back with your experience when you have lots of users that stick with your app, you're putting out fires and implementing new features. Your experience will be meaningful after 6 months to a year.

I'll wager that right now you have a PoC that needs a lot of work to be something that retains users. That's not a criticism, that's just how it works for every startup.

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user43928 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I have been QA testing, fixing bugs, and adding new features near full-time for the last seven months.

I have a pretty good idea about what maintenance looks like. Particularly so about the technical aspects of how effective the models are at refactoring or fixing bugs.

Even if I were to accept the argument that users would have entirely different expectations for my app than I do, it hardly changes the fact that I already know I can easily implement large changes in the code base.

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scott_weber 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not sure if you're trolling at this point but: the previous comment defined "maintenance" for you: "responding to real usage". The things you list are plainly not that.

"Maintenance" does not mean "development after the first week".

	▲	user43928 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not even sure why I bother discussing on HN, only to always get these comments from people who seem to think they know better than me about the maintainability of my own app. I did not ask for your opinion.

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warmedcookie 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having a similar code base size for a mobile app, I believe you. No noticable issues with its size.

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hackersnooze1 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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hackersnooze1 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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arm32 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can now see why you don't want to link your HN to your identity!

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thisisit 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tell me you know nothing about maintenance without saying you know nothing about maintenance. The best part is that you call others about not knowing what they are talking about.

Come back after running your mobile app for at least 6 months in the real world with real users and then we will talk about maintenance.

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Krei-se 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There will never be a link!