AI wrote the first 90% of my app in an afternoon. The last 10% took three weeks.

Description and use

<p>There's an old programmer's joke: <em>the first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.</em> I used to tell it as a joke.</p> <p>Then I let AI write a whole SaaS — auth, Stripe billing, a dashboard, a public API — and the joke stopped being funny. Because AI made the first 90% genuinely instant. And the second 90% was still exactly where it had always been, waiting for me, untouched.</p> <p>The demo worked in an afternoon. The product took three more weeks. This is a field report on the gap between those two things — the part no demo eve

Problem

<p>There's an old programmer's joke: <em>the first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.</em> I used to tell it as a joke.</p> <p>Then I let AI write a whole SaaS — auth, Stripe billing, a dashboard, a public API — and the joke stopped being funny. Because AI made the first 90% genuinely instant. And the second 90% was still exactly where it had always been, waiting for me, untouched.</p> <p>The demo worked in an afternoon. The product took three more weeks. This is a field report on the gap between those two things — the part no demo eve

Outcome

<p>There's an old programmer's joke: <em>the first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.</em> I used to tell it as a joke.</p> <p>Then I let AI write a whole SaaS — auth, Stripe billing, a dashboard, a public API — and the joke stopped being funny. Because AI made the first 90% genuinely instant. And the second 90% was still exactly where it had always been, waiting for me, untouched.</p> <p>The demo worked in an afternoon. The product took three more weeks. This is a field report on the gap between those two things — the part no demo eve

Evidence

AI wrote the first 90% of my app in an afternoon. The last 10% took three weeks.

Source