I'm glad you asked. I have a long history (jeez 40 years now) working with engineering teams to bring products to market - at apple in the late 80s, then my own companies. I've never written production code, but have always been very close to my eng counterparts, either as a single influencer or a manager of teams.
With claude, we built an iOS app for a personal need - pre-scan and score QR codes before the phone acts. I thought it would just be for me, but with encouragement from friends, it is now more fully featured and polished and under review in the app store.
I used claude code 4.8 and followed a structured and linear process, not unlike how I would work with an engineering team on a new product. Requirements document, tech design spec, function contracts and test plans, etc. No agents, just me and claude discussing design and iterating through the steps across ~3 months. Some may say vibe coded but I don't like that term. It doesn't really capture the level of structure and process required for a non-programmer to get quality output.
Has it allowed me to build something I could not have? Absolutely and it's been a wonderful learning experience.
What have I learned that might be helpful? Something I learned in a programming course years ago - garbage in, garbage out. In other words, the better instruction you provide (an agent or a human counterpart) and the more discussion to tease out issues before a line of code is written, the better.
I've also found a "working_with_me" file and a specific "project_handoff" file help maintain state session over session.
If you get enough comments, I'd love to see a roll up report on how HN is using AI. Otherwise.... #subscribed.
With claude, we built an iOS app for a personal need - pre-scan and score QR codes before the phone acts. I thought it would just be for me, but with encouragement from friends, it is now more fully featured and polished and under review in the app store.
I used claude code 4.8 and followed a structured and linear process, not unlike how I would work with an engineering team on a new product. Requirements document, tech design spec, function contracts and test plans, etc. No agents, just me and claude discussing design and iterating through the steps across ~3 months. Some may say vibe coded but I don't like that term. It doesn't really capture the level of structure and process required for a non-programmer to get quality output.
Has it allowed me to build something I could not have? Absolutely and it's been a wonderful learning experience.
What have I learned that might be helpful? Something I learned in a programming course years ago - garbage in, garbage out. In other words, the better instruction you provide (an agent or a human counterpart) and the more discussion to tease out issues before a line of code is written, the better.
I've also found a "working_with_me" file and a specific "project_handoff" file help maintain state session over session.
If you get enough comments, I'd love to see a roll up report on how HN is using AI. Otherwise.... #subscribed.