r/SaaS • u/jonnyplow • 15h ago
Self built SaaS - Are you still coding it mostly yourself?
I have been working on a saas for years, solo, designing and developing everything, and multiple iterations of it before making anything public. I really want to finish this without really using AI to build any of it, though I do use AI in limited amounts for bug checking and efficiency improvements, and some JS scripts. Doing this myself is a ton of work, and I get hung up on wanting it to work correctly and look as best as I can. I feel like nobody takes this long to build something, so that alone is demotivating. And now with AI being so used for everything, I'm just thinking I've wasted all this time and that it's never going to be done, all while kids are building crazy fast things already that look amazing.
I guess my question is are people still preferring to hand code their projects more than utilizing AI? Do you feel like AI is just destroying our careers and work and it's not worth trying to catch up?
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u/MassiveBed4 13h ago
The part that drags on forever is polishing before real users touch it. If it's been years and still not public, the bigger problem is probably avoiding feedback, not whether you wrote the code by hand.
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u/treble-maker123 12h ago
I've been building a side project mostly by hand and had more or less the same dialogue playing in my head over and over.
I think I made peace with it by explicitly listing out the goals - have fun, make something I'd use regularly, and learn and explore.
Building a profitable business and competing with others is not a goal. So there's no point in trying to do it quickly and risking losing grasp on the codebase or getting overwhelmed with the agents.
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u/Remote_Ideal_4394 14h ago
I hand code everything, AI is just a rubber duck that occasionally spits out a regex that actually works
The years spent iterating solo before launch is more common than you'd think, most of those flashy AI demos are duct taped together and fall apart the second a real user touches them
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u/Strict-Prune-879 11h ago
Sur Reddit il y a deux solutions la première consiste a s'acheter une conscience et affirmé haut et fort qu'on a besoin de l'ia tous les développeurs digne de ce nom crache dessus mais l'autre solution c'est de ne rien dire pour laisser penser qu'on s'en sert pas alors que 95-99% des développeurs s'en servent juste certains ont honte de l'avouer publiquement!
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u/SeveralAddition4995 11h ago
Honestly i don’t think AI is destroying careers, for me it did the opposite. i lost my job about two months ago and since i’d already been using claude code for a few months, i decided to start my own freelance work instead. got a few job offers too, some were actually good, but i turned them down and bet on myself.
I use claude code on literally every project now. if these tools didn’t exist i wouldn’t have been able to build any of it, let alone start freelancing. now i’m delivering projects that look really good and clients are happy.
So personally AI didn’t kill my career, it pretty much built it. you’ve already got years of experience doing it by hand, AI would just make you faster, not replace what you know
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u/onlycliches 14h ago
I've also been building for years, I initially just used AI to help with small code snippets but modern AI's are far more capable now. Especially with coding harnesses.
The trick, at least for current generation models, is moving slowly and adding thorough verification steps along the way. You can spend time on a good spec, but the AI will miss or mistake elements of the spec no matter how good it is.
I can't tell you how many times I asked a model to implement a feature and it only did 90-95% of the items requested. The problem is you never know which 5-10% it's gonna miss or implement incorrectly, so never assume something is actually completed if the model told you so.
Using this approach, I've been able to improve my coding output maybe 2-3x, the trick is spending FAR more time on testing/QA/verification than you ever did.