Building a real app with AI still took one full year
surprisetalk · hn · 2026-07-24
Building a real app with AI took a full year
A long-form post/video recounts the experience of using AI to build a real application over the course of a year.
The takeaway is that AI helped, but shipping a real product still took sustained engineering work, iteration, and patience. It’s a useful reality check for anyone expecting instant app generation from current tools.
More from coding & agent
- Is inference latency becoming the biggest bottleneck for production AI agents? — Euphoric_Sea632 · 2026-09-11
- Anthropic researcher: 99% of engineers now run swarms of 300+ self-improving agents — AlishaOutridge · 2026-09-11
- Gergely Orosz: Shipping 10x PRs With AI Agents, Sites Fill With Small Regressions — ducha_aiki · 2026-09-11
- Same Echo Maze prompt, three frontier models: all passed visually but shipped the same hidden bug — eyishazyer · 2026-09-11
- Astra storyboards plus Minimax H3 per-shot generation boost video success rates — Hailuo_AI · 2026-09-11
- Codex tip: use Sol with Astra and Luna sub-agents to save usage — pvncher · 2026-09-11