After struggling with some more complex features even after many iterations, I started to doubt, and questioned whether I'm writing myself into a dead-end.
I did not. I still made progress and things worked out just fine. Then Fable and later GPT-5.6 Sol came out, boosting productivity and complexity of features I could implement successfully.
The effort only ever went down, and my app was released in the AppStore last week, at about ~500k LOC.
I understand why people might believe that using AI and not manually cleaning up suboptimal or overly defensive implementation would eventually result in an unmaintainable mess.
Based on my personal experience and 500+ hours put into my project, I can confidently say that this is not the case. Increased effort to maintain is negligible.
[–] kragen 2 days ago
[–] user43928 2 days ago
I find it hard to talk about any major feature without doxxing myself, since I'm particularly proud of the features that differentiate my app from competitors.
Trying to keep it generic, 3 MRs were for optimizing the app for the iPhone Duo. My app ships 7 AI models that run on-device.
Back then with GPT-5.5, I wouldn't say that the problem was decreasing velocity because of complexity adding up.
It was more like that the open problems were difficult. Matching animations to the gesture, manually handling scroll position in a browser during rotation. When you're already 10+ rounds into instrumenting and layering fixes on top of each other, it can get frustrating.
However, things worked out eventually. I suspect with today's Opus 5.5, many of these debugging rounds wouldn't have been necessary, since it can work for 2h+ on its own with the simulator, which GPT-5.5 at the time did not.
Yes, it's an interesting topic, and at work I've often felt accomplishment from simple, efficient solutions.
Even today Opus 5.5 suggested a plan that I'd call ridiculous. Instead of using a simple package manager feature, it proposed manually handling the issue and ensuring consistency via a new check in the CI. It was idiotic, really.
At the end of the day, it probably wouldn't have made a difference if I went with it, since the proposed ridiculous solution would also have worked. If my CI would ever be bogged down by 50 jobs, I could always start a conversation and probably resolve it in half a day.
And that's with today's Opus 5.5, while the capabilities are now improving every other month.
This ended up a pretty long comment, but I guess what I want to say is that in my experience AI is working well also in large projects, and that many of the fears around maintenance and technical debt have not manifested for me in practice.
[–] kragen 2 days ago
[–] user43928 2 days ago
When working on trickier things that require me to test on device and report results, this would drop to only a single session. I can't context switch between multiple threads while focusing on an investigation where I need to steer the agent.
Yes, I'm using the $200 plan for Claude, and only $20 for Codex, where I use 6.1 Sol to review every change implemented by Opus 5.5.
In the past I paid for both $200 subscriptions, but with Claude's current usage limits, that is no longer needed.
It's probably true that keeping things simple is a little bit of a religious issue for me, but maybe my experience with humans writing software doesn't apply in the same way to AI coding. Maybe a lot of my religious beliefs are wrong!