my experience with AI companion for writing code for giki.ai
building giki.ai in the last 8 weeks have been super intense. One of the choices we made was to build a reasonably large surface area product instead of narrow feature as v0. The downside to that was I had to build a lot of commodity features like (comments, file managers, notifications, task managements) along with heavy integrations to ERP (oracleFusion and Quickbooks). using genAI to short circuit the time is the flavor of the season.
My takeaways from production deployed saas app
its super useful when you are starting off new projects
The first step of most apps seems to be setting up tailwind, auth, basic app setup, authorizations, database etc and not all boilerplates are equal. Most are heavily opinionated or barebones. With AI its much easier to pick and choose a capability and then generate a new customized boilerplate. I have done this for last 4/5 apps i have been building and it works very well. I tried them for rails, python and nextJS stack apps!
without these, its easy to spend a few days navigating around setup, structure and ensuring it all works with latest version. Few templates are maintained over a long time.
**great for building UI components**
with giki I had to build a lot of commodity ui like comment (thread , boxes), tasks like jira etc. It was ridoculously easy to get working component code out if you have a good Figma design. I spent a lot of time in my figma design and but oncei had it, iterating was pretty easy.
**gets tough once codebase gets bulk is pretty hard to manage. Too many bugs**
The problem i continuosly face when working on what is now a reasonably large code base is that, claude or others dont understansd my style yet and the conventions i like for frameworks, file paths or logging so lot of time was spent teaching how my current code looks like what i want. More importantly, a lot of code turns into bit of sphagetti and it was a barrage of bugs before i cut out my AI companion coders to just using them for very specific / narrow bugs or troubleshooting.
**have stopped visiting stackoverflow or googling**
this has been probably single biggest change in my working style. Claude is more than capable of helping me navigate most issues like library version mismatches, config issues or basic how to on most things. A real time saver!
**struggles with integration systems**
I had to build integrartion with multiple ERPs like oracleFusion, quickbooks or zohobooks and while i did explcitly share the API endpoints, lot of times it made up its own endpoint and params.
> e.g asking it to build a curl request for fetch AllLedgerBalances in my oracle fusion and instead of asking for clarifying inputs it simply made up a nice endpoint base_url/ledgers/:ledger_id/fetchAllBalances and its never that simple in oracle world!
How has your experience been?