I built a job management system for a cable location and vac truck company in 8 hours with claude code for $7k USD. It's 80% of the way there. I haven't touched a line of code. The code it generated is quite good as I have learned to ground it with preferred architecture patterns (I just point it to an existing repo on disk). I build up the project starting with frontend mockups. I keep those mockups in the repo. Then I build out small pieces of the data model, and layer piece by piece on top. Unit tests are also generated as we go and I am careful to look at the tests to make sure it's got decent coverage, giving me more confidence in the code it has built.
It can get a little sticky with complicated frontend or backend logic and structure, however it excels at boilerplate. It seems every month it gets better and better.
A job that would take 4-6 weeks, now takes under 1 week. This is why we are seeing a boom in AI related stocks. They might be overvalued, but there is some value there and it is significant.
One final thought - I don't like proprietary AI due to the privacy aspect. Unfortunately they are one step ahead of the open source models, and that one step results in better code, which is hard to pass up. However, I see a near future where the open source models will be very close, or on par. I'm sure there are people out there already that are doing amazing things with open source models. I for one am looking to build a 8 x nvidia v100 cluster of 32GB cards, which can be obtained from China for decent prices. More on this in the future!
