u/suchalignjoslav

Kao sto naslov kaze, ako ste mnogo vajbovali i zena je otisla, ne brinite, mi smo izvajbovali za vas. Srecno u potrazi srodne duse.

Dosta ljudi je krenulo da radi neke svoje aplikacije, i to je super dok je AI jeftin.
Nisu svi dizajneri i kad dodju ovde za savet i misljenje dobiju samo negativne komentare bez ikakvog objasnjenja zasto. Zar ne mozemo da pomognemo kolegama nego smo samo toksicni? Reddit sam po sebi i jeste toksican ali ovaj sub je lagano u top 10%

When it comes to AI and software engineering, we hear "10x" to "100x" productivity increase or "it writes garbage and I'm faster alone". Nobody ever posts numbers. So I tracked a month of my own work, one $100 Claude subscription and a side project I'd wanted to build for a while anyway.

For context, I've done 8 years of engineering, almost all backend and infra. Never touched React Native before July 1st, and I can't design to save my life.

The project is Kombat, real-time multiplayer mini games on your phone. Five games, you play a real opponent, either for free or you both put money in a pot and winner takes it. React Native app with 17 screens, NestJS server with socket.io and Redis, Solidity contracts for the pot, a Next.js site, docker images through CI.

Numbers from git log: 34 days, 296 commits, about 85 hours of my time, ~58k lines of production code. Every commit is between 6pm and 2:30am because I have a day job.

I estimated the same build by hand at around 800 hours. I realistically get 80 hours a month for side projects (learned that from this too), so call it 10-12 months of evenings. And the design would never have been my time at all, it would have been a $15-30k check to freelancers. Brand, app icon, 17 screens, five game boards. No amount of extra evenings makes me a designer.

I didn't really vibe code this. I made the architecture calls myself, wrote specs before implementing, told it exactly which tests to write, and read everything that came back. The model typed most of the code but decided almost nothing. Every time I got lazy with a prompt I paid for it in review time.

Before anyone extrapolates: this is best-case. Solo, greenfield, an app nobody depends on yet, and I know backend well enough to smell a wrong answer in about ten seconds. On an inherited codebase with live users I'd get way less than the 6-10x I saw here.

So I wouldn't say "AI saved me $200k". What actually happened is that without it I'd have quit around month nine, like every other side project in my graveyard.

I wrote this a bit more detailed in my blog post

The app is at playkombat.xyz, iOS only for now, invite-only while it's in test mode. If it looks interesting to you and want to play around, apply on a website and I will send an invite.