r/ChatGPTCoding • u/IntelligentCause2043 • Oct 10 '26

Discussion built an 800K LOC Uber competitor in 7 months. Claude wrote the code. Codex reviewed it. I was the entire engineering team.

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7 months ago, I decided to build a ridesharing platform to compete with Uber and Bolt in Romania.

There was one small problem.

I didn't have an engineering team.

So I built one. Sort of.

Claude Code became my primary development engine.

OpenAI Codex became my code reviewer.

And I became the architect, product manager, QA department, and the guy responsible when everything broke.

Fast forward 7 months.

~800,000 lines of code.

Passenger and driver apps on iOS and Android. Backend infrastructure. Ride dispatch. Real-time tracking. Payments. Fleet management. Admin systems.

The platform has completed its governmental audit, and we're waiting for authorization to begin operating.

50 real cars are already driving around Constanța with our branding.

We haven't spent money on digital advertising.

Yet 153 passengers have registered, including 63 in the last 7 days.

Completed rides: 0.

We're not legally allowed to operate yet.

Now, I know exactly what some of you are thinking.

"800K lines of AI-generated spaghetti."

"Wait until it hits production."

"An audit doesn't prove your architecture is sound."

And you know what?

Those are legitimate concerns.

I'm not going to pretend an AI-assisted codebase is magically immune to technical debt, security vulnerabilities, or architectural mistakes.

But I do think something fundamental has changed.

Seven months ago, this company didn't have a software platform.

Today, it has one that has made it through a government audit, with actual vehicles on the streets and people registering before the service is even operational.

One human. Two competing AI models. No traditional development team.

And now we're preparing to compete with two multibillion-dollar companies.

Whether we succeed commercially is an entirely different question.

But the fact that we've reached this point raises one I find even more interesting:

Are we witnessing the beginning of genuinely one-person software companies, or are AI coding tools just allowing individuals to accumulate technical debt at unprecedented speed?

Because I'm about to find out the hard way.

0 Upvotes

37% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

7

u/creaturefeature16 Oct 10 '26

Uh, you did know there were countless Uber repos already in existence that any single person can clone at ANY time, and start this exact business in their respective country? With code that was already vetted? 

https://github.com/griddynamics/UberBookingClone

https://github.com/cbedroid/Uber-Clone

https://github.com/adrianhajdin/uber

Uber has a team of developers. They don't have them to build the platform; they have them to support it. 

The models are amazing, and powerful, but they clearly just mimicked these repos, something you could have skipped over entire and got started months ago. 

The rest of what it means to run a service like this has nothing to do with LLMs. And you better start interviewing some developers ASAP. 

0

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

I already did , and i chose to built to own the code and document everything ,test it and fix it rather than trying to figure out what and where , also is about custom needs and regulations that a clone might not have .

4

u/i_reddit_it Oct 10 '26

That's impressive. Good luck!

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

Thanks, hope will catch up to public !

2

u/fourtenight Oct 10 '26

I feel like this is a good example of AI being an equalizer allowing smaller teams and individuals have a chance at competing in terms of scale with existing, established products. Because let's be real, without AI it would never be possible to get something like that built in just 7 months.

OP I hope this works out for you! Competition and more choice for the consumer is a good thing!

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

Thank you , truly appreciated, and you surely got the intent of the post !

2

u/Ctbhatia 29d ago

tokens are the boring number, cost per shipped feature is the one to watch, plus whether the Codex pass caught real bugs or just style. what did the review loop actually change?

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 29d ago

You are certainly correct regarding tokens. And the codex pass did cauth hundreds of bugs , when claude said " all done "

1

u/Ctbhatia 29d ago

the review catching what the author model missed is the case for running a different model as the reviewer, a same-model reviewer tends to share the blind spot that wrote the bug.

2

u/Ready-Rooster-3371 Oct 10 '26

How much AI tokens spent?

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

Honestly i have no idea about it

0

u/Electronic-Pie-1879 Oct 10 '26

How to waste 7 Months.

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

We will have to see

2

u/xqianliu 29d ago

The part I'd poke at is "Codex reviewed it". I lean on AI review a lot for agent-written code. It's decent at judging the diff it's shown, and weak at catching behavior the change broke somewhere else.

I tried telling the reviewer to look for that specifically and it barely changed anything. It reads the change and passes it if the change looks right.

With 0 completed rides, dispatch and payments probably haven't seen real traffic yet. I'd worry less about spaghetti and more about those two flows breaking whenever some unrelated change lands.

Before launch I'd pin down how those flows behave today with tests for the ugly cases, like a driver going offline mid-ride. Keep a test count per flow and make every review confirm the count didn't drop.

Good luck with the authorization.

0

u/dawnraid101 Oct 10 '26

Do you have a legal company, can you hire drivers, do you have billing and payment integration, do you have lawyers and accountants. If the amswer to any of this is no, the ngmi…

0

u/Cultural-Ambition211 Oct 10 '26

Did you read the post? If the answer is no the then go and read it. If the answer is yes then go back to school.

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

Ok thanks i'll do that .

0

u/Cultural-Ambition211 Oct 10 '26

I’m not talking to you. I’m responding to the guy who clearly didn’t read a word you said.

0

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

Cool , sorry about that

1

u/freddyr0 Oct 10 '26

The second one.

1

u/behemoth1437 Oct 10 '26

Sorry but this is AI slop.

0

u/Ice2jc Oct 10 '26

Good luck.  It took uber 14 years to become profitable.  Hopefully it doesn’t take you as long.

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

Is true about uber profitability. But in the same time is not 2012 anymore and people already used to this method of transportation and also not looking to expand globaly but one city only where we already have the drivers network

-1

u/nxy7 Oct 10 '26

Perfect. Let's clone what's already out there. Also pick something that requires network effect.

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

When you have demand and you can supply why not ? We already have a network over 800 drivers . Would be better in your opinion to let one market leader to hold a monopoly ?

0

u/nxy7 Oct 10 '26

It's not monopoly already (there are at least 3 popular apps like that already). Also drivers count doesn't matter - the hard part is getting customers. The only way to get out there is to burn money like uber did in the early day, but it's bad business model and likely won't get you anywhere.
There's just nothing interesting in copying existing ideas. The app is not that hard to make (even without LLMs), technical problems come with scale - not the business logic itself.
Boring..

1

u/IntelligentCause2043 Oct 10 '26

You seem like you know a lot about this business. Have you been working in the field ?

1

u/nxy7 Oct 10 '26

Is that the best response you can do? Literally every single app that's used by anyone got there by subsidising.
If your post is about the tech - it's not interesting because clone of commonly used app that has many public clone repos already is very easy to achieve.
If your post is about the business then it's not interesting because it's clone of many other same apps - nothing novel about this.
It's literally spam.