[SyneRyder]

That isn't what the hype is. If that's the kind of stuff you're reading about or watching, you should find better sources. You can one-shot some things, and it makes for an impressive demo (oh yay, yet another video game made instantly) but anything larger and more useful will probably be a conversation. (Though not necessarily with a human, AIs can discuss it among themselves too.)

Your first one-shot might be a good rough prototype. From there, you continue the conversation with your refinements. While Claude goes and works on that for 15 minutes - you can go and do other work. Or talk with another Claude in another window to make progress on another project.

A good mental model is to imagine you're talking to a remote developer. You need to give them an extremely detailed spec on the first go if you expect them to get it right the first time. Sometimes it's better to explain "this is my grand vision, but how about we first mockup a prototype to see if that's actually how I want it to work". Sometimes Claude will suggest you talk about your plan together first to remove the ambiguities from the plan, or you can encourage Claude to do that with you.

(Also, the remote developer mindset is useful - treat the remote developer with respect, with humanity, and they're more likely to be helpful towards you and motivated to align with your goals.)

Consider that in an hour or two of conversation, you now have your app, completed, fully debugged... and not once did you look at the code, and you spent half of that time catching up on your other tasks. That's vibe coding.

[nottorp]

> If that's the kind of stuff you're reading about or watching

HN - posts and comments - is full of it.

And my personal experiments with the free chatbots contradict it ofc.

[SyneRyder]

Well, I've offered what I can to help. If your experience is mostly free chatbots, I would definitely suggest trying Opus 4.5 or 4.6 in Claude Code. The agentic harness of the software around the model (ie Claude Code) is important. Consider also that some of us have been doing this for a year and have already built our own MCP server tooling to go faster. Giving your AI the same kind of deterministic software tools that you use is important (eg make sure your AI has access to a diff tool, don't make it try and do that "in its head", you wouldn't ask that of a human).

As for listening to Hacker News... yeah, this is one of the worst places (well, Mastodon is worse) and HN is surprisingly AI-doomerish. I don't check in here very often anymore, and as of this week I just get Claude to summarize HN headlines as a morning podcast for me instead.

My own experience: my first few uses of Claude in Dec 2024 seemed rubbish, I didn't get it. Then one day I asked it to make me a search engine. The one shot from that wasn't perfect, but it worked, and I saw it build it in front of my eyes. That was the moment & I kept iterating on it. I haven't used Google or Kagi in almost a year now.

Anyway, hope it helps, but if not using AI makes you feel more comfortable, go with what fills your life with more value & meaning & enjoyment.