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efields | 6 months ago

In a week, Claude Code and I have built a PoC Rails App for a significant business use case. I intend to formally demo it for buy-in tomorrow after already doing a short "is this kind of what you're looking for?" walkthrough last week. From here, I intend to "throw it over the fence" for my staff, RoR and full-stack devs, to pick it apart and/or improve what they want to in order to bring it from 80-100% over the next two months. If they want to rewrite it from scratch, that's on the table.

It's not a ground-breaking app, its CRUD and background jobs and CSV/XLSX exports and reporting, but I found that I was able to "wireframe" with real code and thus come up with unanswered questions, new requirements, etc. extremely early in the project.

Does that make me a 10x engineer? Idk. If I wasn't confident working with CC, I would have pushed back on the project in the first place unless management was willing to devote significant resources to this. I.e. "is this really a P1 project or just a nice to have?" If these tools didn't exist I would have written spec's and excalidraw or Sketch/Figma wireframes that would have taken me at least the same amount of time or more, but there'd be less functional code for my team to use as a resource.

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OtherShrezzing|6 months ago

If you think your CC wireframe has taken approx as much time as it'd have taken you with another tool like Figma + spec-writing, and one of your engineering team's options is "rewrite it from scratch" (without a spec), has the use of CC saved your company any time at all?

It reads like this project would have taken your company 9 weeks before, and now will take the company 9 weeks.

g3f32r|6 months ago

I think the comment was showing that the project takes 9 weeks either way, but coming to that determination was much more confident and convincing with a functional demo versus a hand-wavy figma + guesstimate.

coffeefirst|6 months ago

Yeah. The prototyping is neat. But in past lives I would literally sketch the "POC" on paper.

I sort of want to get back to that... it was really good at getting ideas across.