In a week, Claude Code and I have built a PoC Rails App for a significant business use case. I intend to formally demo it for buy-in tomorrow after already doing a short "is this kind of what you're looking for?" walkthrough last week. From here, I intend to "throw it over the fence" for my staff, RoR and full-stack devs, to pick it apart and/or improve what they want to in order to bring it from 80-100% over the next two months. If they want to rewrite it from scratch, that's on the table.
It's not a ground-breaking app, its CRUD and background jobs and CSV/XLSX exports and reporting, but I found that I was able to "wireframe" with real code and thus come up with unanswered questions, new requirements, etc. extremely early in the project.
Does that make me a 10x engineer? Idk. If I wasn't confident working with CC, I would have pushed back on the project in the first place unless management was willing to devote significant resources to this. I.e. "is this really a P1 project or just a nice to have?" If these tools didn't exist I would have written spec's and excalidraw or Sketch/Figma wireframes that would have taken me at least the same amount of time or more, but there'd be less functional code for my team to use as a resource.
If you think your CC wireframe has taken approx as much time as it'd have taken you with another tool like Figma + spec-writing, and one of your engineering team's options is "rewrite it from scratch" (without a spec), has the use of CC saved your company any time at all?
It reads like this project would have taken your company 9 weeks before, and now will take the company 9 weeks.
I think the comment was showing that the project takes 9 weeks either way, but coming to that determination was much more confident and convincing with a functional demo versus a hand-wavy figma + guesstimate.
> was much more confident and convincing with a functional demo versus a hand-wavy figma + guesstimate.
Except it also blurs the lines and sets incorrect expectations.
Management often see code being developed quickly (without full understanding of the fine line between PoC and production ready) and soon they expect it to be done with CC in 1/2 the time or less.
Figma on the other hand makes it very clear it is not code.
Which is why I like balsamiq. It looks like hand sketches but can be interactive. I can create any UI for brainstorming in a matter of minutes with it. Once the discussion is settled, we can move to figma for actual UI design (colors, spacing,…).
I'd argue that it's specifically the combination of social media and smartphones. 2000s era "social networks" of AIM and forums were fine; you had to actually be at your computer so it wasn't an all-consuming activity for most people.
I don't think it's right. Despite the Internet, we really aren't in a constantly connected society. In fact, I'd argue we are less connected now than we have been for a long time. Everyone's "on" Social Media, but they're not socializing on it. They're spouting into the void, promoting and advertising themselves, tunneling themselves deep into echo chambers, but it's not really social. People write and write and write, but the only things they read are what the algorithms feed to them. I guess I'm gatekeeping socialization, but this doesn't seem like socialization to me.
When someone posts a clever quip to Twitter and gets 10,000 likes, this isn't socialization. It feels more like some weird performance art.
Its not all screaming into the void. From my point of view people broadcasting their lives in real-time leaves little to catch up on. Why call/meet Joe to talk about his trip to Antigua if he already posted his trip in real-time including video? You know what all your friends are doing.
The twitter scenes is out of my wheel house. Never had an account or knew anyone on it that I cared about.
> Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.
This right here is the crux of the problem - profitability rules over any and all functionality.
Even in a scenario where a given design/layout was universally desirable, it will lose out to a design that is more optimal for revenue generation.
Ok, yes, Google is a company that needs to make money, but changes that optimize for revenue over usability have a strong chance of a domino effect down the line of a dwindling user base paying an increasing cost to use a service that is no longer worth it.
> I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.
I don't disagree with this assessment, but I believe it just means that they know where the inflection point is between functionality (driving engagement and retention) and revenue (increased at the expense of retention and engagement) and try and ride that intersection to maximize both.
> I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.
There's an argument to be made here that YouTube just doesn't have any real competition due to the infrastructural requirements being so heavy and the network effect of having so many people using the platform, and that's different than doing well enough to be able to compete in an environment that had more competition.
Put another way, the way YouTube is run works great up until you have an actual competitor operating at the same scale, at which point it falls over, as opposed to one that could effectively compete against another service.
This feeds back into the point about riding that curve of revenue vs. functionality. If you're right at the intersection of that curve you have very little flexibility with which to adjust in competition with another entity. This just points YouTube believing (not unreasonably so) that they're an effective monopoly and don't need to worry about competition, so it doesn't enter into their calculations. They may never need to worry about it.
None of that is the same thing as being a "good" or "optimal" service for users, and you can't really "crush it" when there's no one of a similar size within the space to compare against.
"Music" in this case has such a high quality bar. Truly, the delta production value of popular music today vs. even 20 years ago is huge. So our standards are higher, and if you're a solo musician trying to reach these high standards you will most likely burn out and hate the process.
But maybe I'm over-thinking it. Musicians have told stories of giving up everything for their music over and over again. It can be one of those tortured loves.
I don't know, I agree that production value has jumped in the last decade but these trends are often cyclical. The overproduced boy bands of the 50s and early 60s gave way to aesthetically simple folk singers like Bob Dylan, and the shiny, glittery pop-rock of the 80s got swept away in a cloud of secondhand smoke by Grunge. I believe another one of those counterculture, indie backlashes is due to hit soon.
It is really crazy the level of knowledge that goes into production today and I don't see it going back. New grunge will re-amp in the computer if for no other reason than because software amp sims are cheaper than hardware and your settings/values are instantly perfectly recallable in a sim.
Even modern metal requires insane specific technical knowledge nowadays. Dance genres are to the point I don't even understand the differentiation (in xyz the kick drum transient click goes 'clihhhhhck' but in xyy it goes 'cllihhhhhckk').
Arguably the indie scene is bigger than it’s ever been. I think the issue is more that, like social media, streaming music services like Spotify and YouTube keep everyone in their bubble. Even if you try to break out the algorithm pulls you back in.
Radio was a much different paradigm that had to respond to changing desires or risk losing revenue and going out of business. So it had to react to listener desires with much more finite resources and that led to (I think) larger cultural shifts within music than we see now.
Some amount of discipline is certainly good, but too much can be bad for your health. It comes down to value.
It's okay to not finish side projects — they were fun for a bit! Good for you for finding some low-cost fun!
I make music in my spare time and in the past year I think I barely have an EP worth of tracks that are _nearly finished_, but I've got dozens of neat loops. I've come to peace with this because the value I'm looking for is in the act of spontaneous creation with my instruments.
I put down movies, tv shows, video games when they start to feel like an obligation rather than a fun pursuit. The value starts to taper off. I think that's okay. I have a day job making computer things, a family… free time is so precious. Why force a non-interest?
It starts being a problem if the side projects aren't fun for a bit. Such as if they're really big and complicated and absurdly tedious and you only do them because they're "going to be really fun in a year" or something, and you never get there. Or you do and find it's still tedious work.
