u/dragosroua

https://youtu.be/whpnrb9Jc7Q

Short answer: yes, it can be removed.

Long answer: you’ll have to heavily edit your text. Alternatively, use open source models on your own hardware

In my thinking, I never get signals about that. I'm done thinking when I'm done thinking, it's not like I get a notification on a background thread saying: "stand by, 5more seconds of thinking"...

Later edit: someone asked in the comments what I was doing when I screenshotted. Nothing special, refactoring my small fitness app Shape Walk. Not a monolith legacy codebase, lol.

I am starting a 30 days evaluation period for a major switch in my workflow: going from Claude Code (Opus 4.8) to MiniMax 3.

Context: I've been using Claude exclusively for the last 5 months, during which I built and shipped 9 apps in the AppStore. I'm very happy with it. What I do not know is if the cost is actually ok - maybe there are better alternatives?

I am already using MiniMax for the last 4 days and I'm quite happy with it too. It is a little bit too verbose (but maybe that's just a setting in OpenCode to hide its thinking process), but execution is clean and fast. I've been using it for small features on 3 apps so far, and I even tried an ASO refactor for one of them.

The refactors went smoothly, but the ASO intervention was a bit clunky. It eventually pulled it through, but it circled back and forth big time and struggled with measuring the length of the keywords string (100 chars limitation in AppStore).

I'm updating the challenge on my blog, if you're curious.

I used Claude to brainstorm Product Hunt copy and metadata for the launch of one of my apps (Shape Walk) and it all went quite smooth, until we hit the categories step. I asked what categories my app would be fit for, Claude came with very confident answers.

Only those categories don't actually exist. TBH, I actually like the comeback: "since you're inside PH submission..." Like, ok, let's work together on this one, mate... :))))

I've been coding for 20 years and make mobile apps for 15+. This February I decided to try vibe coding, but at scale. Back then, I had 1 app in AppStore. Now I have 10.

These 4 months were intense, and many lessons were learned. 6 guidelines surfaced, here they are, in no particular order:

• use 2 models, one as workhorse, and the other as the verifier / backup. Sometimes I hit my Claude limit midday, which is frustrating, so I got a MiniMax 2.7 subscription too. I reckon any other decent model will do it. Claude Code does the main stuff, backup does boilerplate, fixing, review.
• optimize at the root. I spent A LOT more time writing specs than interacting with the model. Around app number four, I stitched together a genesis prompt template, that I started to use going forward. It has 23 sections, I open sourced it (link at the end) and it contains everything from monetization to design system.
• keep your mental mode light. This was an unexpected bottleneck: switching back and forth between 3-4 apps at the same time (that was my upper limit) is taxing. I had to make serious changes to how I work. I literally struggled to keep my focus.
• expand verification, because build shrinking. As a senior dev, I used to spend the best part of my work writing code. Now no more, Claude Code does it for me, BUT I have to double down on verification. I check especially after bug fixing and at the beginning of every app generation, to make sure the structure, file names, variables, etc. are in order.
• marketing starts as early as building. Before February, the main question driving my work was: "is the app done yet?" Now it's: "does anyone know about the app yet?" I started promotion, marketing as soon as the first lines of code were generated. Still learning my way around here, but it's starting to work.
• treat every app as an experiment. This one was a bit hard to swallow, because I'm used to the old, inertial way of doing things: bet on an app, push it and do whatever it takes, because of the sunken cost fallacy (I worked so hard to build this). Now the building is approaching zero, so pivoting / iterating is cheaper too.

If you're vibe coding for a living, or at scale, I'd love to hear your comments on these.

P.S. The 10 apps and the technical challenges I faced with each of them, as well as the genesis prompt template, are here, in a longer post. (It's a mix of productivity, books, utilities and fitness apps)

it eventually did the job, but I found the first reaction kind of funny. FWIW, no reference to sticking only to software engineering tasks in CLAUDE.md or elsehwere.