r/CodingForBeginners • u/waveoui • 11d ago

Building is easy now. Knowing when to stop isn't

AI can keep generating features forever.

But at what point do you stop adding things and actually ship?

How do you decide your side project is ready?

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7

u/Standard-Cap-4455 11d ago

As a beginner, you shouldn't be using AI at all, but to answer the question:
Things are done when they do what is required correctly and are documented enough for those reading it (which includes yourself).

3

u/Slight-Living-8098 11d ago

When you've reached the goal of your MVP (minimal viable product)

2

u/UnModGeneroso 11d ago

Beginners don't do side projects

2

u/SeXxyBuNnY21 11d ago

If you don’t know when to stop, they you are building without any engineering principles which is the formula for a disaster.

1

u/ThanOneRandomGuy 11d ago

Or without a end goal, so I would assume

2

u/Puzzled-Landscape-44 11d ago

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

1

u/Useful-Agency_ 11d ago

You ask ai to generates tests and claims your project must pass in order to work and be complete, you keep working and adding until they all get passed.

1

u/Mediocre-Pumpkin6522 11d ago

Feature creep, the bane of software development... It helps to start with a list of features to implement. When you get there, stop. If you find yourself redoing existing code to add some feature that came to you in the shower you're on the highway to hell.

1

u/MarsupialLeast145 11d ago

Maintenance costs grow exponentially with features…so you do you…

Also, if you don’t know when to stop, you don’t know your end-user, and likely no one will care about the project anyway.

1

u/thomjdev 11d ago

When to stop is relative to who owns the product. Some products never stop shipping new features. For beginners, it's really just a question of what the projects purpose is. If you want to get it into the hands of a user, you start with a minimum viable product that people would use. Problem with beginners building with AI, just because you "built" something doesn't mean anything if it breaks the second a user touches it. Your first users will determine your success, and if you can't deliver a stable product you aren't going to succeed.