Hold its Hand

AI companies are claiming that they can build an entire app. A non-technical founder could be forgiven for believing this. Unfortunately, this is still not true. The sad thing is that it seems like it’s true until it’s too late. Or that if you just knew how to prompt it correctly it would work.

Even going back and forth with Claude or ChatGPT and asking for very specific things requires handholding. A common use case is to write some repetitive code to translate data from one format to another. Even with this very simple instruction, the response usually needs tweaking.

So having an AI build an entire application is frankly unrealistic right now. It might improve with time. The issue is not the AI’s coding capability, it’s that there are too many possible directions to go at each juncture. The AI is going to get tripped up eventually—leaving the human to mop up that mess.

Much harder to do without context.