The latest AI discourse is building something that could build things very expensively, instead of enabling builders to do things inexpensively, which is supposed to be the selling point of AI right now
If Claude Code or Codex just one-shotted an app for you, Read this.
Now you gotta go through every screen and find the 47 edge cases that break it. Users will do things you never imagined. Then comes auth, database setup, API rate limits, error handling for when the server goes down at 2am. You need analytics to figure out what users actually do vs what you think they do. App Store optimization, screenshots, descriptions, review responses. Privacy policies, terms of service, data compliance. Push notifications that actually work without being annoying. Performance optimization because that smooth demo gets real laggy with real data. State management across the whole app. Caching strategy. Offline support. Responsive design across 15 different screen sizes. Testing on older devices that somehow still exist. CI/CD pipeline so deploys don't eat your weekends. Then users start requesting features you never planned for and suddenly your clean architecture needs a rewrite.
The first version is maybe 10% of the actual work. Building is easy. Shipping and maintaining is where it gets real.