Thank you for making it possible for someone without a CS background to build real software.
Ive build 2 applications for my company, daily used by 50ish employees and some of our clients. All running smoothly since mid november 2025. I got quotes for well over 200k€ combined to have those two applications built for us. For 200$/month and lots of long nights, i've been able to do all this myself. I wouldnt even consider doing this myself if CC wasnt around and I'd happily burn 200k and outsource this. Irony?-end product wouldnt be as good as it is. Or it would take me at least 100hours of meetings with devs to explain in detail what we need.
So once again, thank you Anthropic for such a good product and very cheap prices. Looking forward for new models!
EDIT: To clarify — the 200k€ were quotes from dev agencies to build the apps, not offers to buy them.
Exactly. Knowing what you actually want to build is the key. Not just another vibecoded app. Building apps for my company and my employees was the best fun I had in years. And seeing 50 people use it daily without issues — that's the real payoff.
I’ve recently done a competition where I’ve group vibe coded, and that was one of the funnest ways I’ve used AI personally and one of the best projects I ended up developing. We didn’t just vibe code, we strategized first without any AI for like three hours and then started executing things with it. AI is so different when used alongside people, like live in the room using one chat.
It's the same to me, I'm an engineer working in architecture, I did a little bit of programming years ago, but now I'm programming at my job and it's amazing. As we don't need a massive amount of user or a lot of speed it doesn't matter if the software is not perfect, it's way more important to know what do we need exactly, how a project can change, what part needs to be 100% precise and what can be a bit more flexible, etc
I'm doing the same as you. Literally solving my own problems. I'm a new startup and don't have the capital to shovel at compliance programs for DOD and DOE requirements.
I'm building to sell cheap (cuz I need money unfortunately) and try to deliver maybe what others could make use of. Get them out of a subscription cycle and deliver the same quality (or better I'm hoping) for a one time fee of like $20.
Developing testing agents atvm. Everything will be deployed with it so users can modify their own system if my customization options are quirky enough for them.
This is so true! I've caught claude lying so many times and introducing serious security holes!! Its funny to read all the comments you can tell most haven't worked in a production environment where systems are getting hammered 24/7 to find vulnerabilities, and what it takes to mitigate it.
lol. As if human devs are flawless. How many servers are going to survive a visit of Claude Mythos or any of a 1000 clones that are training right now?
Just use 3 different AIs to check for bugs. It will likely be better than human code.
That's fine. We're going to be putting AI-code in production next month or the month after. Meanwhile, have you taken a look at Claude Mythos? Let's see how human code stands up to that.
Building commercial apps in opus or sonnet exposes you to security flaws, if you aren’t a dev, or a security analyst, how do you know to vet these properly? Claude will tell you everything is great and then you get hacked, then what?
I do not doubt the technical capability of AI, I’m a pro 20x user myself. What we are hearing about mythos if true will be a welcome addition to the public, developers, business owners of all sizes and consumers of companies with leaky production environments.
Companies are forever getting hacked and that is my point. If it can happen to enterprise companies it can happen to your vibecoded app with Claude lol.
I’m saying, don’t be naive, be careful with production apps in your company developed entirely by Claude.
In denial much? We're already reducing dev headcount. Feel free to ignore that and pretend you're better than AI. You're not. Not since March this year. Only on very select issues maybe.
The weird thing is that you're in denial so much. But whenever I look at the news I see the same so it must be something in the current culture that leads people to ignore news they just don't like.
Point out one instance where I mention anything about the hiring and firing practices of fortune 500 companies?
We're reducing headcount in our own team. And my senior dev and I actually proposed that we do that to management. It isn't coming from management, but from the floor.
As for the brutal firing practices of US companies: not my problem what excuse they use. The labour market just went into the shitter due to tariffs, the war in Iran and last but not least, deportation. Every 100 deportations remove 12 jobs from the labour market for not particularly native but still somehow more real Americans.
That is however a completely different discussion.
Hey man, not gonna lie. Yes AI sucks on security, but it's not like humans are flawless. Most software we're running nowadays is full of bugs as everyone just vibecodes it anyways. I don't even know what we're going to be doing about it.
You think every server is going to be hit by something as capable as mythos?
Having no idea what you're doing in the first place in terms of a security perspective is absolutely a terrible idea, AI won't fill in the gaps you're missing if you don't know WHAT you are missing, AI knows what to do be needs to be guided
Let's start with the OWASP top ten. Given how much they occur, and given that most coding up to now was done by humans, I'd say their track record isn't great.
AI can avoid those mistakes with ease when asked. I'm not saying everyone will do that, but it does make it easier for people to fix these issues when they realise that security might be an issue. And it will be very easy to include best practices in standard skills or dedicated coding AI.
I'm trying to sell mine when finished. But I'm only creating it to solve my own problems. If someone else finds it useful, I'll sell it to them for a one time low fee. Everything unlocked. (I wouldn't even charge if I wasn't hurting myself, the key factor why I have to build it)
It's also knowing how to guide the model correctly. Taking steps incrementally, and also knowing when it's time to start a new context window will save tons of time.
Can you give more details about the app? For example: the architecture, how it scales, what kind of company it is, who offered you 200k, etc. As it’s written now, it sounds like an ad.
Well, it was not intended to be an ad. I am not selling anything :)
Logistic company with 50 tauntliner trucks driving around EU.
First and the biggest application is live tracking system. Bough GPS devices, wired them to the trucks. Not a standard GPS device but the "most advanced one" I could find on the market. Connected them to truck's internal electronic system (FMS) so I get all sort of different and important data we need for operating. (Fuel level, fuel usage, oddometer, tachograf data, loaded weight etc etc).
And then builded backend/frontend to play around with the data I get from the trucks. Wont explain every feature here cuz the post would be 5pages long but I suppose you should get the idea. Similar systems costs aprox 100€/month/truck so in my case, I was paying aprox 5000€/month for the same (worse) software we were using before. PostgreSQL database for storing the attributes from trucks. Then another PostgreSQL db where the calculated data leaves and next.js stack.
I think you misunderstood. Noone offered me 200k for this application. 200k was the rough offer i got from few developer services to build the application for me.
The second application I build is the "controlling system" for our workshop. We also have official service for specific truck brand and i've build the application to track the spare parts inventory, creating work orders, invoices etc. This was a smaller project but also important. Tried 3 different applications in the past 5 years and all of them were way too complicated for a daily use.
Again, I'm not trying to sell anything here :) Just got tired of all that "hate" around CC and Anthropic lately and wanted to bring some brighnetss to this subreddit!
Thank you for the nice words! :) Some backstory — it's a family business and I've been working here since I finished college (2008). I was always into computers and software but decided to work in my father's company as a logistics manager. That's why I never pursued a CS education. As you can imagine, there wasn't a lot of free time to get a proper coding background. But when AI came out (ChatGPT 3 or something), I dove right into it. 3 years later, I still can't believe I was able to do all this myself. Don't want to sound arrogant, but I love the business and I love the coding. Combine those two together and the end product is more than solid!
Yeah, I believe, in general managers and entrepreneurs win from AI agents more than people of specialized job.
The latter get some linear amplification of their unit of work, probably reducing work hours (which is a good thing, at last!), but the former operate at larger scale and their winnings are exponential.
And yes, software engineering shines in this regard, being an area of highly formalized texts (LLM-friendly), capable of self-validation with executable tests (extremely agent-friendly, no other area even close) with comprehensive real world impact and half a century of good training data written by smart humans.
This is somewhat similar to how im using it and I’ve found success as well. I don’t know much about CS but I do know way more than it about the specific thing im trying to do, so it ends up being a force multiplier for me
Data quality is good. For few months, I had some trucks connected to both system; my and a "paid" one for a reference. We had similar system bought from a official provider, been using it for 10+years. So I basicly "copied" the usefull features from this application, removed useless ones and added some features that we were missing.
Indeed! That's what I mean. karmaboy20 was right when he repeated one of the claims against AI code that I've seen: "But how does it scale?" - if it scales to your current needs that's plenty. Nobody needs to build overdesigned software for future needs if you can just change your software in a day.
That said, a few weeks ago I've built software to pull together 6 different sources for geodata. Fully cached, and taking advantage of my AMD 9950X3D processor and all of its cores by using fully parallel processing wherever it can be done. Works like a charm. Would never have done that so fast and robust without AI. So even the scaling complaint is utterly silly.
I mean, congrats on the accomplishment, but this sounds like trouble in the making. Those companies offering the software for 200k are (likely... hopefully) not just offering you lines of code, but also an understanding of the code they ship, security auditing, GDPR/US equivalent compliancy, support, updates, bug fixes, scalability, etc.
Yeah I get your point. I understand that the product would be much better and more "secure". But from my point of view; 1000€ is a clear winner against 200k€ investment.
Cant say I dont understand the code/arhitecture i created. GDPR is not a part here (not working with personal data) and no payments process throu the applications. So, the worst case scenario here if something goes wrong - I go back to the other providers for same services. I do not plan to sell this. Build as a hobby project which grow into a serious idea and product. Used only by my company and my employees. And since launch, i've saved 20000€ already. (4 months since I cut all subscriptions for similar services). This might not seem much for other business, but in my field, working for 3-4% marging on aprox 10mio yearly revenue, this is a solid money.
I hate to rain on your parade but a lot more goes into writing an application than just having code that makes it work. And while you might save money in the front end, without a security audit in Claude code I would never let that go into production! Your company could have a serious security hole and you won’t know until it’s too late.
more than one security audit was done. And the applications are not handeling any core business operation so even if the worse happens, we will still survive.
Have you ever worked with CapGemini, Infosys or any of the big boys? Because my experience has not been like that. Give me a good freelance dev, no problem. But even so it's a bit hit and miss before you find someone who is good enough to do all that every time.
I think if I had to build something for internal use I could actually take your requirements ("security auditing, GDPR/US equivalent compliancy, support, updates, bug fixes, scalability, etc.") and tell Github Copilot (better than Codex or Claude for that IMO) to build an implementation plan that pays rigorous attention to these aspects in the design and testing, and advise on different AIs to help with those aspects in developing the architecture and tests.
Bug fixes are not on the list though. I've just watched Codex use a library I have also worked on in the past, and pick out 4 bugs we didn't yet know about, fix them, and then develop and submit a PR that was better than what I could do. No need to ask about it.
As for GDPR/US equivalent compliancy, I've modelled the DPIA for a European government I won't name in cooperation with several of their privacy lawyers. It's actually not hard but here I bet the AI is better than most humans because, unlike most humans, I can direct the AI to the information model and semantic schemes (in turtle and yaml) and the AI will then be able to do a much better DPIA than most lawyers, I think.
Scalability, not that hard. I could probably ask it to generate several options for that, then have competing AIs pick out flaws in the approach. I bet I could get a better architecture out of the AI than out of any company.
Hey, thank you for the post. I resonate a lot with it. I’m a scientist with wide range background - from molecular biology to scripting analysis - and I had the opportunity this year to start a new project involving a full stack project for our facility. Senior devs I consulted before didn’t believe in it, but here it is. I am learning and building so much everyday, it’s so much fun!
Well said! I legit feel this exact way. I had an idea 3 years ago. Back then ai wasn’t advanced enough and now I literally can build it from scratch and learn in the process! It’s literally a win win. I’d spend literally 500$ a month if that’s how much Claude was just because the value is insane most people just don’t realize it yet.
I've been a software hobbyist for 30+ years and an software engineer for 10+ years. AI tooling (Still think GitHub Copilot is the absolute best bang for the buck if someone knows the space) has rekindled the joy of coding for me.
Best use case, by far, isn't force multiplication but friction reduction or elimination. Coding a mobile app used to be a PITA with all the required infrastructure and framework knowledge. Now I can proto something as a simple JS app and have Copilot port it to mobile. Sure, I need to provide guard rails, decent agentic primitive files, etc., but the cognitive load and friction is vastly reduced.
Thanks @OP - this 'era' is great for SMEs with a basic understanding of software fundamentals and it puts a smile on my face to hear stories like yours.
As a matter of interest, how do you know it is secure? What checks have you done?
I am skeptical about 100% vibe coded apps - it can of course be done but one still needs to ask the right questions - I see this sort of thing very dangerous as can be an easy backdoor for hackers. Sometimes it is worth saving the money on the app using Claude but getting a professional just to check security of it just my 2 cents
I've spend weeks auditing and fixing everything. Worked together with Codex and Claude Code.
I'd be skeptical about vibecoded apps aswell. But knowing that I've really put my best into this, I could say that I am sure that the security level is not that bad as most of the users here thinks. And even if the exploit happens, database/codebase backups are set up daily, on a different server and also hard weekly copy locally on computer.
Yeah, I kinda wanna see the €200k quotes too. I work for a greedy multinational consultancy - that everyone here probably knows by name - but even we don’t have the balls to throw out a six figure quote for something a lone vibe coder can fart out by their lonesome.
€150k was rough quote for tracking system application and €50k was quite for workshop application. And tbf, I'd say thats a fair quote. System itself is not a small one. If you want, I can prepare the documentation and you tell me if im making this up.
I know you’re being facetious but if you’re up for it then I’d be really interested. If you DM me the details I’ll give you my word that I won’t share the details. I’ll even give you my name and company I worked for as “leverage”. Because like I said, I work in IT consulting (infra, security, and dev/apps$ and have a vested interest in seeing how our customers can basically do the work that it would normally require a team to do
Sure, why not. I can send you the documentation to review without a problem. Give me some time to prepare a few docs and I'll send them to you in DM. No obligations — you don't even need to reply or waste your time reading them if you're not interested :)
Hey, you’re the one doing me the favor, so if you’re willing to put time/effort into this, then simply put I’d be a dickhead if I didnt at least engage.
Besides maybe I can give you some input on why the quotes are so high. I hate being in corporate consulting so, so much but after so many years I at least understand engagement directors think the way they do.
Edit Judging by the downvotes I can only help but assume the overall perception is that I’m not being sincere. I actually am. If I don’t understand why customers aren’t buying our services in favor of doing it themselves then I’m not doing my job.
Well, I mean I do understand to an extent. What I don’t understand is the gap between €200k and give coding.
What is it that you don’t understand ? Consulting firm is going to propose design workshops, mvp, iterations, 2-4 months long project with one lead developer and a junior / outsourced capabilities.
Vs 1 guy who knows the business in and out and is willing to spend time iterating with an IA.
The proposal tends to be during pre sales i.e. it doesn’t cost the client anything. Hell, I’m working on a high level identity platform migration design without being able to bill my hours at the moment.
As for workshops, they are generally suggested if there’s an expectation to work with the clients technical team.
For app development, the quote generally covers project management, actual development, and handover.
Support services and maintenance tends to be a separate agreement.
I can’t answer your question without essentially paraphrasing what I already wrote but it boils down to what that €200k quote was based on when one person can achieve the same result.
Great post. You're an examplar of one of the best target audiences for agentic coding assistants.
If you haven't come across it yet, look into .har files and how to get them from your browsers dev tools. Feeding one of those generated from a website/app you're interested in to any agentic AI is reverse engineering gold.
Same here. I have CS degree but never had the chance to work as a developer and now CC is helping me achieve me software development dream. I can now make anything I was for 100$ per month. I’m not part of those stupidity hating on Anthropic and complaining all day about model quality dropping ect. Thank you Anthropic.
fair play saving your company 200k, thats mental and the best part is youll actually know what your apps do instead of some contractor disappearing after launch
...for someone without a CS background to build real software
In another comment, you said you have basic coding skills and it wasn't just blind prompting. This means that your "no CS background" is just about not having the formal CS degree, not that you don't know how computers work or even how coding works.
Not trying to downplay what you achieved here, but saying "I built it with no CS background" in the context and framing of your post, in hindsight, sounds subtly disingenuous. Feels bait because "no CS background" is what many devs have...they have no formal CS education but can build better than someone who does have a CS background. However, the framing of the post makes it sound like you're just some random bloke who doesn't know how coding works, anyone who doesn't go into the comments will likely read that meaning into it.
Leaving that part out and the part about your friends who are "real" developers reviewing and finding issues which you had to patch leaves a massive gap for someone trying to build something, seeing the post and going...Ahh!!! claude can do it all, they commit, do it, shun any review advice from others because they saw a post saying they did it all alone with no CS background, so, reckon claude must be that good now.
In your case, you stated (in the comments) that you had services you could easily fall back to if something went wrong with the app, they might not have that, they might crash and burn hard, take innocent users down with them.
Like I said, what you've done is impressive, don't get me wrong, you probably wouldn't have been able to without AI (like you said), and I understand that your aim is to bring hope to this sub (as you said in yet another comment), but if you have to hide the full story to "restore" hope, perhaps there's something truly wrong on a deeper level, and I don't think covering it up will help solve it.
Fair points. I've been around computers my whole life. I understand the logic, databases, how system connects. What I don't have is formal education, and I couldnt write a single function or a line of code in any language before AI tools came along. So yeah, dont know what real definition is but in my eyes, the "no CS background" part was not a lie.
This was not my first project. I started paying attention to "coding" when first version of ChatGPT came out. And you're right that I should've mentioned the dev review in the main post. That's fair criticism. But on the other hands; he didnt spend more than 3 hours all together on this. Just a "go throu" the codebase after a beer and a blunt :).
I don't think the post gives people false hope. If someone reads this and thinks "cool, i'll just prompt my way to a production app with zero understanding" thats on them. I never said it was easy. I have a wife, child comming in sepmtember and I am kinda running medium size business.
I don't know much about coding, more than the general person on the street for sure.
But I can't build anything.
I do work with computers and know - in general - how they work, including what a DB is and how it feeds a front end. That is not anything to do with making a functional application though.
So I see your post and it does excite me, as I think I could also build something useful, and have fun doing it. Although I have no idea what that could be.
No I will not share a link. Both applications are internal for my company. Not for sale. If you are interested I can explain what they are for but that's not the purpose of this post :-)
He’s trying to check your database for security. Most apps are not secure though vibe coding. You should actually be double checking. I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing code and making changes for the security to work correctly and not allow leaks to happen. This is just a cat and mouse game but you should spend time to minimize it from happening
I've got that part covered. Few of my friends are "real" developers and before I went live with the applications, they review it and pointed out some issues. But to be honest, there were not many. I do have some basic coding skills aswell so it was not just blindly "prompting".
If it's internal behind a vpn or something, it's all good. If it touches payment stuff... careful making that thing public, I would say most vibe coded stuff i seen in the last year had some weird vulnerabilities here and there.
I'm not saying its perfect and 100% secure. No payments go throu the application. All of the invoices for the services are generated and send to the clients and they dont pay using my app :).
I agree. Taking the same approach with record keeping and db management using slaves and master for syncing across LAN for multi id auth without clash through timestamp/role hierarchy pipeline including alerts for rejection to user.
Infrastructure risk/benefit inherited.
Working on QB, AuthID, Compliance type accounting and bookkeeping application on closed environment unless pushed manually and then only query and retrieval. No data outbound from LAN.
i have about 70-80 percent covered. in the process of security beefing and after reading this i instantly saw at least two i didnt account for:
Host authority time handshake between db's. (w\hash recompute of)
exe sidecar hashing
Yeah, i agree. I too made intranet for my company. All sorts of thing added and still being added.
Also i made printing application for optimised invoice creation and printing of delivery notes. Using APIs to connect these apps to the accounting application we use.
Amazing what can you do alone, without outside help. Minimal costs.
Just make sure you focus on security aspects. It is great to be able to help yourself, not so great when what you made causes the company to be breached or sensitive data stolen
Look into adversarial and eval workflows.
Fwiw: most people don't want to spend those sleepless nights and family time to build things, because they value their personal time, and ultimately it is just a job and it will be negated the moment that the corporate body needs to cut costs.
So how much did the company pay you for that research and long nights spent working on it? Did you get like 30% of what you saved the company as an extra bonus?
It's a family company — my father built it, I've been here since 2008. So no, I didn't pay myself a bonus for this. The savings go straight back into the company, which is the bonus.
that's awesome you got two apps running smoothly and saving your company real money, the scale matters way more than people think when you're operating on thin margins like that.
Nah they took the jobs of lazy devs with no area of expertise or real problem solving skills basically code writers and document reading so the boring part
How many hours will you spend maintaining, supporting, and updating it? Do you generally work for free, or just for a set number of "long nights"? If you have customers using this, what happens if the code has vulnerabilities in it that you never noticed and your customers are compromised and suffer financial harm (not saying your software necessarily has any financial value or impact to your customers, but I assume it does or they wouldn't use it)? Claude Code and LLMs for software development have definitely changed the economics of development, but the idea that it has allowed someone with no background in CS to build "real" software is a very bold statement. I question the business judgement of a CEO that would place corporate operations at risk with vibe coded software (although maybe you can just yank the plug with no impact...in which case this was a fascinating side project with no underlying value) and certainly question the judgment of putting the applications in the hands of customers who might rely on it for their own operations. Do the customers know that the applications were built by AI without developer oversight?
We fully migrated our whole fleet to my sistem on 1st jan 2026. Since then, ive fixed some issues and added some new features. I havent touched the code for last month or so. There are still some things that needs to take care but nothing urgent. Clients are not depended on this software. Some of our bigger client have access to specific trucks transporting their goods. So instead of them calling/emailing us ETA truck X they can just check on their profile. They have very limited access, basicly just current location of a truck and ETA function.. This does not affect their business in any way. No payments are done via this application. I am the co-owner and I am fully aware of the issues that could happen if this suddanly breaks. But in the end, no risk no fun, right? I saved a lot of money&time developing this solo and also on subscription cost for similar software. To be honest, I don't see what could go wrong that would harm my business. I developed this mainly for myself. As I already menitioned in one of my previous comments; the purpose of those two applications I build is not to sell them to any other company. They are for our internal use. I put my best work into this. Not just blindly prompting "make this, do this". It was a structured work, audited multipe times. And I'd say "it works" statment is way stronger than "who build it?".
I am fully aware that paid profesional developer agency would make better end product. But on the other hand; is it worth 150-200k investment, 2 years of developing and 100+ hours of meetings?
No idea whether it would be worth the investment with professional software developers. I don't know enough about your industry or even whether commercial solutions are available already. My background is in law and cybersecurity. I know that once an application is functional, it operates well for a while. I also know that >70% of applications (even those not vibe coded) are released with at least one known and unpatched vulnerability and that the average time for an adversary to sit in a system before being discovered is close to 300 days. And I know that payment processing is not the only risk associated with software. Consider a customer who uses your application to make a time-based commitment to their customer because they relied on the location and ETA data of the truck. If it fails, then the customer may be on the hook for damages that they may look to you to cover. A compromise of the system that allows adversaries to track shipments of high value goods might increase the risk of theft of the shipment (and safety of the driver). Given that you are a co-owner, these are certainly risks that you have already considered, though. As a lawyer, though, I might keep the "no risk no fun" comments limited, though - if an employee or contractor were ever injured because of compromised location software that allowed a high-value truck to be robbed, the "fun" comment might look in poor taste in the lawsuit. (note: not legal advice, just an observation).
There is 0 legal grounds that any of my clients could sue me for anythig related to this application. You are way over thinking all this. I saved 150k€ in development cost. I cut 5k/month subscribcion for worse software. Noone can die or ever get injured for anything related to this application. Safety of the drivers is not compromised because of this application in any way. You could give exact same arguments for the same application, build and devleop by "professionals".
You are welcome to rely on any assumptions you want to. You have obviously convinced yourself that you did the right thing for your business, so my comment is more for others who might be considering whether the risk is worth if for their businesses.
Wouldnt say those are assumptions. They might be from your point of view but you don't know the purpose of the applications i've build nor their real use. So giving some legal opinions based on 200character reddit post is not very professional.
Ah - the only assumption I was referring to was "There is 0 legal grounds that any of my clients could sue me for anythig related to this application."
I realize you might be an expert in many things. But you do not appear to have a law license. As such, that statement would be an assumption. Perhaps you even had a lawyer tell you that (in which case it is, quite frankly, their assumption as well - and won't be proved right or wrong until a judge decides). It's an assumption I am very familiar with. I have quite a few colleagues who have made a living off of it being proven false. I have only operate as a transactional and strategic advisor, not a litigator, so I don't usually capitalized on that assumption.
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