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1 hour, 30 cents and Three Aha Moments from AI building an MVP

Author

John Davison
April 11, 2025

Three Aha Moments from Our AI-Assisted Coding Session

Throughout our live coding session using Aider, we experienced several breakthrough moments that highlighted the transformative potential of AI-assisted programming. Here are three key insights worth sharing:

The Speed of Innovation

John: "I gotta say I'm pretty impressed with this so far"

Lucas: "Yeah, it's looking good."

John: "It's hard to argue that this is not the future... we basically just made an MVP in like 40 min."

The realization hit us both simultaneously - we had just built a functional Slack-to-GitHub ticketing system in under an hour. What might have taken days of development, configuration, and debugging was accomplished in less time than a typical meeting. This wasn't just incremental improvement; it represented a fundamental shift in how quickly we could move from concept to implementation.

AI Excels Where Humans Procrastinate

"I'm not gonna lie. I don't really like writing error handling. And so if you're like, 'Hey, Aider, from now on is in charge of air handling'... this right here is probably better air handling than I've ever written."

"It comes back to humans are lazy. Well, not entirely lazy. But this is a lot of keystrokes right to manually write. Every single keystroke is annoying, even if you know it should be written."

This moment perfectly captured how AI can complement human developers. We tend to focus on creative problem-solving while avoiding tedious but necessary tasks like comprehensive error handling. AI showed no such reluctance - it eagerly addressed edge cases and provided detailed error messages that surpassed what we typically write. The AI didn't just code faster; in some aspects, it coded better.

The Economics of AI Leverage

John: "So all it took was my 12 years experience, and Lucas's [9] years... plus 30 cents."

Lucas: "Yeah, and 30 cents."

John: "So 21 years and 30 cents... I would call this incredibly high leveraged 10x kind of stuff."

Perhaps the most striking realization came at the end when we saw the cost of the entire AI-assisted development session: just 30 cents. The equation of "21 years of combined experience + 30 cents = functional application in 40 minutes" represents an extraordinary ROI. This isn't just about coding faster; it's about dramatically reducing the economic barriers to software creation and maintenance.

These moments reinforce that AI isn't replacing developers - it's amplifying our capabilities, handling the tedious parts we dislike, and driving down costs while accelerating delivery. The future belongs to developers who learn to collaborate effectively with these AI tools, combining human creativity and expertise with AI's speed and thoroughness.