>My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.
May I ask what does this app do ? 200k is like GTA vice city level, is like sqlite level, If its a financial tracker or a to-do list or an agent coordinator I am going to kill myself
I'm not going to share exact details about my paid app, but you could think media management, with a lot of extra features, an in-app browser with custom controls, and multiple AI powered features with on device processing.
> I'm not going to share exact details about my paid app
You might not be aware of this, but you've answered the question - just indirectly.
You're selling an app, but don't want to share any details, or even name it?
Call me suspicious.
He's not. That's how things will be from now on. Because there's plenty of hacks who think prompting will make them millions if they could just find that one idea, yet aren't willing to do the work to find, vet, build, and iterate.
I said I'm hoping to complete it this month and I already shared some details.
Should I post my market and keyword research too, here on this site for software developers and entrepreneurs?
It doesn't matter when you post it; some kid with a $200 claude sub (or cheaper) is going to clone it for far cheaper than you, and sell it for far cheaper than you.
There's no friction to what you produced, so why do you think that you won't have 100s of clones, all cheaper?
We're now in a market for lemons as far as software goes.
I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to.
With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an established app that does the same thing, and your app cannot beat it on quality, it will be hard to attract users.
A conundrum I see is that once someone releases a “solution” to a problem, it becomes much easier for someone else to come up with prompts to have AI make a clone of that solution.
Basically, the moat for many products is disappearing, and it would be relatively cheap for someone to make a clone that undercuts the cost of the first to market. The original product is charging $2? Cool, the clone will cost $1 - maybe it’s not as good due to less QA, but consumers will see the lower price and buy it.
> I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
I'm afraid your hundreds of hours of prompting will reduce to "clone this product, here are 200 screenshots of every screen."
I don't understand why people aren't getting this: there is no skill in prompting! The CC leak literally showed Anthropic engineers developing Claude with broken half-english prompts like "gud, now make better".
Hundreds of hours doing what? If you're not reviewing the code, then what are you doing, just planning features? Because that would be trivial to copy in a fraction of the time by just feeding screenshots of your app to one's AI of choice.
Yes, and a lot of QA testing.
That's the thing. The moment you publish, the design you spent 100s of hours on also becomes public, at which point it becomes entirely replicable with little to no recourse. Hence the theme of this entire thread: a devaluement spiral.
Despair is a choice some people have made, and they want to drag others into it to justify their inaction. Take your best shot. Maybe it takes off, maybe it doesn't.
Either way, it's a hell of a lot better than being a replyguy.
>it's a hell of a lot better than being a replyguy.
It's best to live by your own words
Ignore the "dropbox-in-a-weekend" trolls, they're just nosy. Your project sounds interesting, good luck.
Vice City was released nearly 25 years ago! Also it's a game, so it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. If you count the unique 'features' (or systems) of Vice City, you might find it's a comparable count to the number of features of a medium-sized mobile app.
You are joking right ? renderer, audio, math, physics, animation, AI, asset streaming,.... in addition to the gameplay itself, and you compare it to a medium-sized mobile app ???
Apps usually have tons of boilerplate, so pure LoC may be similar. But in density, no contest. I recently dug up an old objc app of mine and was shocked how few lines it took to send a REST request, parse and process it. Nowadays it is split into multiple files, usecases, repositories, protocols to accomplish the same. All in the name of testability or architectural “correctness”. Write that in a game and you’re fired because it kills performance.
There's a different bar for maintenance though. Many games exist in a single point in time, they ship and are done, whereas the goal with SaaS is to support the code forever.
Maintenance, sure, but also: games have one chance to be good, and that is at release. With a multi-year development cycle, what we get at release (of the good ones) is like a version 4 or 5 of an app. Everything is connected and changed (and thus maintained) over the years.
The physics of the car tires in vice city by themselves outweigh 99% of all apps in terms of complexity and features…
I feel you need to clarify which mobile apps are "medium-sized" for you, because if we just interpret this comment literally it's just laughable.