5 ms·

I've literally built the entire MVP of my startup on Claude Code and now have paying customers. I've got an existential worry that I'm going to have a SEV incid

by 1zael 1y ago

I've literally built the entire MVP of my startup on Claude Code and now have paying customers. I've got an existential worry that I'm going to have a SEV incident that will trigger a house of falling cards, but until then I'm constantly leveraging Claude for fixing security vulnerabilities, implementing test-driven-development, and planning out the software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap. I hope this story becomes more and more common as time passes.

lajisam 1y ago
“Implementing test-driven development, and planning out software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap” can you give some concrete examples of how CC helped you here?
- 1zael 1y ago
  Yeah, so I continuously maintain a claude.md file with the feature roadmap for my product (which changes every week but acts as a source of truth). I feed that into a claude software architecture agent that I created, which reviews proposed changes for my current feature build against the longer-term roadmap to ensure I don't 1\ create tech debt with my current approach and 2\ identify opportunities to parallelize work that could help with multiple upcoming features at once. I have also a code reviewer agent in CC that writes all my unit and integration tests, which feeds into my CI/CD pipeline. I use the "/security" command that Claude recently released to review my code for security vulnerabilities while also leveraging a red team agent that tests my codebase for vulnerabilities to patch. I'm starting to integrate Claude into Linear so I can assign Linear tickets to Claude to start working on while I tackle core stuff. Hope that helps!
foobarbecue 1y ago
[flagged]
- Mallowram 1y ago
  [dead]
- BeetleB 1y ago
  > I bet you could replace your slop pile with a tenth of the lines of clean code, and chances are it'd be less work than you think. Actually, no. When LLMs produce good, working code, it also tends to be efficient (in terms of lines, etc). May vary with language and domain, though.
  - stavros 1y ago
    Eh, when is that, though? I'm always worrying about the bugs that I haven't noticed if I don't review the changes. The other day, I gave it a four-step algorithm to implement, and it skipped three of the steps because it didn't think they were necessary (they were).
    - BeetleB 1y ago
      Hmm... It may be the size of the changes you're asking for. I tend to micromanage it. I don't know your algorithm, but if it's complex enough, I may have done 4 separate prompts - one for each step.
      - foobarbecue 1y ago
        Isn't it easier to just write the code???
        BeetleB 1y ago
        Depends on the algorithm. When you've been coding for a few decades, you really, really don't want to write yet another trivial algorithm you've written multiple tens of times in your life. There's no joy in it. Let the LLM do the boring stuff, and focus on writing the fun stuff. Also, setting up logging in Python is never fun.
        foobarbecue 1y ago
        Right-- it's only really capable of trivial code and boilerplate, which I usually just copy from one of my older programs, examples in docs, or a highly-ranked recent SO answer. Saves me from having to converse with an expensive chatbot, and I don't have to worry about random hallucinations. If it's a new, non-trivial algorithm, I enjoy writing it.
- 1zael 1y ago
  Congratulations, you replace my pile of "slop" (which really is functional, tight code written by AI in 1/1000th of the time it would take me to write it) with your "shorter" code that has the exact same functionality and performance. Congrats? The reality is no one (except in the case of like competitive programming) cares about the length of your code so long as it's maintainable.
  - foobarbecue 1y ago
    But that's the thing -- because I WROTE my code, I know there's nothing bizarre in it. Your code is almost guaranteed to have something bizarre and unexpected in it, at least somewhere.
- PUSH_AX 1y ago
  Clean code? Fewer lines? Found the intermediate.
- dang 1y ago
  This is a belated reply, but you broke the site guidelines badly here. It's not ok to attack other users like this, no matter how right you are or feel you are. We ban accounts that do, so please don't do it again. It's fine, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully, but that is a very different kind of comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - foobarbecue 1y ago
    Apologies, forgot to check my reaction.
imiric 1y ago
Well, don't be shy, share what CC helped you build.
- orsorna 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - turnsout 1y ago
    There’s still a stigma. I think people are worried that if it gets out that their startup was built with the help of an LLM, they’ll lose customers who don’t want to pay for something “vibe coded.” Honestly I don’t think customers care.
    - mlrtime 1y ago
      I used the analogy to how online dating started. I remember [some] people were embarrassed to say they met online so would make up a story. We're in that phase of AI development, it will pass.
  - jaggederest 1y ago
    I generally work as openly as possible on github, and I am deliberately avoiding manual coding for a while to try to learn these (infuriating/wonderful) tools more thoroughly. Unfortunately I can't always share all of my work, but everything on github after perhaps 2025-06-01 is as vibe-coded as I can get it to be. (I manually review commits before they're pushed, and PRs once in a complete state, but I always feed those reviews back into the tooling, not fix them manually, unless I get completely fed up.)
    - bopbopbop7 1y ago
      Everyone wants to see your very profitable startup, it’s simply free advertising. Why not share it?
      - jaggederest 1y ago
lifestyleguru 1y ago
duh, I ordered Claude Code to simply transfer money monthly to my bank account and it does.
ComputerGuru 1y ago
> but until then I'm constantly leveraging Claude for fixing security vulnerabilities That it authored in the first place?
- dpe82 1y ago
  Do you ever fix your own bugs?
  - ComputerGuru 1y ago
    Bugs, yes. Security vulnerabilities? Rarely enough that it wouldn’t make my HN list. It’s not remotely hard to avoid the most common issues.
    - fluidcruft 1y ago
      Granted I've only been using Claude for a short time, but in my experience it tends to write code that matches the style of the code it's editing. Which is sort of a "no duh" thing in retrospect but I hadn't considered that. That is to say old crappy code I wrote long ago when I was dumber gets old-crappy dumber code style suggestions from Claude. And newer better-practices code that is very careful gets Claude to follow that style as well. It wasn't something I considered at first but it makes sense if you think about text prediction models and infilling and training by reading code. The statistics of style matching what you are doing against similar things. You're not going to paint a photorealistic chunk into a hole of an impressionist painting, ya know? So in my experience if you give it "code that avoids the common issues" that works like a style it will follow. But if you're working with a codebase that looks like it doesn't "avoid those common issues" I would expect it to follow suit and suggest code that you would expect from codebases that don't "avoid those common issues". If the input code looks like crappy code, I would expect it to statistically predict output code that looks like crappy code. And I'm not talking about formatting (formatting is for formatters), it's things like which functions and steps are used to accomplish whatever. That sort of thing. At least without some sort of specific prompting it's not going to jump streams. Edit: one amusing thing you can do is ask Claude to predict attributes of the developers of the code and their priorities and development philosophy (i.e. ask Claude to write a README that includes these cultural things). I have a theory it gives you an idea about the overall codesmell Claude is assigning to the project. Again I am very new to these tools and have only used claude-code because the command line interface and workflow didn't make me immediately run for the hills the way other things have. So no idea how other systems work, etc because I immediately bounced on them in the past. My use of claude-code started as an "okay fine why not give these things the young guns can't shut up about a shot on the boring shit and maybe clear out some backlog" for making chores in projects that I usually hate doing at least a little interesting but I've expanded my use significantly after gaining experience with it. But I have noticed it behave very differently in different code bases and the above is how I currently interpret that.
davepeck 1y ago
> I've literally built the entire MVP of my startup on Claude Code and now have paying customers. Would you mind linking to your startup? I’m genuinely curious to see it. (I won’t reply back with opinions about it. I just want to know what people are actually building with these tools!)
- jaggederest 1y ago
  My github has examples of work I've done recently that are open source. I'm deliberately trying not to do too much manual coding right now so I can figure out these (infuriating/wonderful) tools.
  - davepeck 1y ago
    Thanks, I’ll take a look. Everyone uses these tools differently, so I find AI-generated repos (and AI live-coding streams) to be useful learning material. FWIW: “Infuriating/wonderful” is exactly how I feel about LLM copilots, too! Like you, I also use them extensively. But nothing I’ve built (yet?) has crossed the threshold into salable web services and every time someone makes the claim that they’ve primarily used AI to launch a new business with paid customers, links are curiously absent from the discussion… too bad, since they’d be great learning material too!
    - jaggederest 1y ago
      I will have one for you, most likely, later this week! Fingers crossed anyway!
- bopbopbop7 1y ago
  He won’t, everyone that says they made a profitable startup with some AI code generator 3000 never seems to link their startup. Interesting.
  - davepeck 1y ago
    There are many reasons that "I used AI to do it all and now I've got $REAL ARR" strikes me as unlikely. To name just two: 1. I code with LLMs (Copilot, Claude Code). Like anyone who has done so, I know a lot about where these tools are useful and where they're hopeless. They can't do it all, claims to the contrary aside. 2. I've built a couple businesses (and failed tragicomically at building a couple more). Like anyone who has done so, I know the hard parts of startups are rarely the tech itself: sales, marketing, building a team with values, actually listening to customers and responding to their needs, making forward progress in a sea of uncertainty, getting anyone to care at all... sheesh, those are hard! Last I checked, AI doesn't singlehandedly solve any of that. Which is not to say LLMs are useless; on the contrary, used well and aimed at the right tasks, my experience is that they can be real accelerants. They've undoubtedly changed the way I approach my own new projects. But "LLMs did it all and I've got a profitable startup"... I mean, if that's true, link to it because we should all be celebrating the achievement.

by 1zael 1y ago

lajisam 1y ago

“Implementing test-driven development, and planning out software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap” can you give some concrete examples of how CC helped you here?

1zael 1y ago
Yeah, so I continuously maintain a claude.md file with the feature roadmap for my product (which changes every week but acts as a source of truth). I feed that into a claude software architecture agent that I created, which reviews proposed changes for my current feature build against the longer-term roadmap to ensure I don't 1\ create tech debt with my current approach and 2\ identify opportunities to parallelize work that could help with multiple upcoming features at once. I have also a code reviewer agent in CC that writes all my unit and integration tests, which feeds into my CI/CD pipeline. I use the "/security" command that Claude recently released to review my code for security vulnerabilities while also leveraging a red team agent that tests my codebase for vulnerabilities to patch. I'm starting to integrate Claude into Linear so I can assign Linear tickets to Claude to start working on while I tackle core stuff. Hope that helps!

foobarbecue 1y ago

[flagged]

Mallowram 1y ago
[dead]
BeetleB 1y ago
> I bet you could replace your slop pile with a tenth of the lines of clean code, and chances are it'd be less work than you think. Actually, no. When LLMs produce good, working code, it also tends to be efficient (in terms of lines, etc). May vary with language and domain, though.
- stavros 1y ago
  Eh, when is that, though? I'm always worrying about the bugs that I haven't noticed if I don't review the changes. The other day, I gave it a four-step algorithm to implement, and it skipped three of the steps because it didn't think they were necessary (they were).
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    Hmm... It may be the size of the changes you're asking for. I tend to micromanage it. I don't know your algorithm, but if it's complex enough, I may have done 4 separate prompts - one for each step.
    - foobarbecue 1y ago
      Isn't it easier to just write the code???
      - BeetleB 1y ago
        Depends on the algorithm. When you've been coding for a few decades, you really, really don't want to write yet another trivial algorithm you've written multiple tens of times in your life. There's no joy in it. Let the LLM do the boring stuff, and focus on writing the fun stuff. Also, setting up logging in Python is never fun.
        foobarbecue 1y ago
        Right-- it's only really capable of trivial code and boilerplate, which I usually just copy from one of my older programs, examples in docs, or a highly-ranked recent SO answer. Saves me from having to converse with an expensive chatbot, and I don't have to worry about random hallucinations. If it's a new, non-trivial algorithm, I enjoy writing it.
1zael 1y ago
Congratulations, you replace my pile of "slop" (which really is functional, tight code written by AI in 1/1000th of the time it would take me to write it) with your "shorter" code that has the exact same functionality and performance. Congrats? The reality is no one (except in the case of like competitive programming) cares about the length of your code so long as it's maintainable.
- foobarbecue 1y ago
  But that's the thing -- because I WROTE my code, I know there's nothing bizarre in it. Your code is almost guaranteed to have something bizarre and unexpected in it, at least somewhere.
PUSH_AX 1y ago
Clean code? Fewer lines? Found the intermediate.
dang 1y ago
This is a belated reply, but you broke the site guidelines badly here. It's not ok to attack other users like this, no matter how right you are or feel you are. We ban accounts that do, so please don't do it again. It's fine, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully, but that is a very different kind of comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- foobarbecue 1y ago
  Apologies, forgot to check my reaction.

imiric 1y ago

Well, don't be shy, share what CC helped you build.

orsorna 1y ago
[flagged]
- turnsout 1y ago
  There’s still a stigma. I think people are worried that if it gets out that their startup was built with the help of an LLM, they’ll lose customers who don’t want to pay for something “vibe coded.” Honestly I don’t think customers care.
  - mlrtime 1y ago
    I used the analogy to how online dating started. I remember [some] people were embarrassed to say they met online so would make up a story. We're in that phase of AI development, it will pass.
- jaggederest 1y ago
  I generally work as openly as possible on github, and I am deliberately avoiding manual coding for a while to try to learn these (infuriating/wonderful) tools more thoroughly. Unfortunately I can't always share all of my work, but everything on github after perhaps 2025-06-01 is as vibe-coded as I can get it to be. (I manually review commits before they're pushed, and PRs once in a complete state, but I always feed those reviews back into the tooling, not fix them manually, unless I get completely fed up.)
  - bopbopbop7 1y ago
    Everyone wants to see your very profitable startup, it’s simply free advertising. Why not share it?
    - jaggederest 1y ago

lifestyleguru 1y ago

duh, I ordered Claude Code to simply transfer money monthly to my bank account and it does.

ComputerGuru 1y ago

> but until then I'm constantly leveraging Claude for fixing security vulnerabilities That it authored in the first place?

dpe82 1y ago
Do you ever fix your own bugs?
- ComputerGuru 1y ago
  Bugs, yes. Security vulnerabilities? Rarely enough that it wouldn’t make my HN list. It’s not remotely hard to avoid the most common issues.
  - fluidcruft 1y ago
    Granted I've only been using Claude for a short time, but in my experience it tends to write code that matches the style of the code it's editing. Which is sort of a "no duh" thing in retrospect but I hadn't considered that. That is to say old crappy code I wrote long ago when I was dumber gets old-crappy dumber code style suggestions from Claude. And newer better-practices code that is very careful gets Claude to follow that style as well. It wasn't something I considered at first but it makes sense if you think about text prediction models and infilling and training by reading code. The statistics of style matching what you are doing against similar things. You're not going to paint a photorealistic chunk into a hole of an impressionist painting, ya know? So in my experience if you give it "code that avoids the common issues" that works like a style it will follow. But if you're working with a codebase that looks like it doesn't "avoid those common issues" I would expect it to follow suit and suggest code that you would expect from codebases that don't "avoid those common issues". If the input code looks like crappy code, I would expect it to statistically predict output code that looks like crappy code. And I'm not talking about formatting (formatting is for formatters), it's things like which functions and steps are used to accomplish whatever. That sort of thing. At least without some sort of specific prompting it's not going to jump streams. Edit: one amusing thing you can do is ask Claude to predict attributes of the developers of the code and their priorities and development philosophy (i.e. ask Claude to write a README that includes these cultural things). I have a theory it gives you an idea about the overall codesmell Claude is assigning to the project. Again I am very new to these tools and have only used claude-code because the command line interface and workflow didn't make me immediately run for the hills the way other things have. So no idea how other systems work, etc because I immediately bounced on them in the past. My use of claude-code started as an "okay fine why not give these things the young guns can't shut up about a shot on the boring shit and maybe clear out some backlog" for making chores in projects that I usually hate doing at least a little interesting but I've expanded my use significantly after gaining experience with it. But I have noticed it behave very differently in different code bases and the above is how I currently interpret that.

davepeck 1y ago

> I've literally built the entire MVP of my startup on Claude Code and now have paying customers. Would you mind linking to your startup? I’m genuinely curious to see it. (I won’t reply back with opinions about it. I just want to know what people are actually building with these tools!)

jaggederest 1y ago
My github has examples of work I've done recently that are open source. I'm deliberately trying not to do too much manual coding right now so I can figure out these (infuriating/wonderful) tools.
- davepeck 1y ago
  Thanks, I’ll take a look. Everyone uses these tools differently, so I find AI-generated repos (and AI live-coding streams) to be useful learning material. FWIW: “Infuriating/wonderful” is exactly how I feel about LLM copilots, too! Like you, I also use them extensively. But nothing I’ve built (yet?) has crossed the threshold into salable web services and every time someone makes the claim that they’ve primarily used AI to launch a new business with paid customers, links are curiously absent from the discussion… too bad, since they’d be great learning material too!
  - jaggederest 1y ago
    I will have one for you, most likely, later this week! Fingers crossed anyway!
bopbopbop7 1y ago
He won’t, everyone that says they made a profitable startup with some AI code generator 3000 never seems to link their startup. Interesting.
- davepeck 1y ago
  There are many reasons that "I used AI to do it all and now I've got $REAL ARR" strikes me as unlikely. To name just two: 1. I code with LLMs (Copilot, Claude Code). Like anyone who has done so, I know a lot about where these tools are useful and where they're hopeless. They can't do it all, claims to the contrary aside. 2. I've built a couple businesses (and failed tragicomically at building a couple more). Like anyone who has done so, I know the hard parts of startups are rarely the tech itself: sales, marketing, building a team with values, actually listening to customers and responding to their needs, making forward progress in a sea of uncertainty, getting anyone to care at all... sheesh, those are hard! Last I checked, AI doesn't singlehandedly solve any of that. Which is not to say LLMs are useless; on the contrary, used well and aimed at the right tasks, my experience is that they can be real accelerants. They've undoubtedly changed the way I approach my own new projects. But "LLMs did it all and I've got a profitable startup"... I mean, if that's true, link to it because we should all be celebrating the achievement.