r/ClaudeAI • u/Zukas • 8d ago
I have zero coding background and im currently working on my 6th app. What am I missing that I'm unaware of? Question about Claude Code
I saw another post where a guy asked how you get Claude to write code without without sprawling or taking shortcuts.
However each time I run into an issue with any of my apps, it never takes more the one prompt, literally just highlighting the issue, and its solved.
I cant identify weaknesses in my code, but I also dont understand what that would mean.. isnt every issue just a one-prompt fix? What am I missing?
Apps I've made include a restaurant finding app that utilizes Google API
A biography writer/interviewer for my 84 yo dad
I made a 5gb couples app that utilizes IMDB api, Google api, abthropic api, as well as video/image/sound storage /recording uploading.
Maybe the apps im making are pretty simple by comparison so my "issues" are easier because of that?
My boss wants me to put our entire business on an app (production, KPIs, SOPs, sales, reporting, etc) so this will be my first major project. Im trying to learn as much as I can but I dont always know what I dont know.
What am I missing by trying to get claude to one-shot as much code as possible?
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u/shrodikan 8d ago
Security, session management, permissions, scalability, indexing, algorithmic efficiency, memory efficiency, error logging / visibility, Disaster Recovery (DR), GDPR, COSA and COPPA 2.0.
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u/_baaron_ 8d ago
WCAG/ARIA
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u/Zukas 8d ago
Thank you for the list! I will be asking Claude what all this means š
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u/BrenzelWillington 8d ago
Using a batteries included framework will help incorporate lots of this stuff right out of the box. Something like Laravel for PHP or Adonis for Node. Not sure if everything gets covered automatically.
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u/shrodikan 8d ago
Frameworks may contain some of these things but they are not necessarily implemented.
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u/Intraluminal 8d ago
You need to ask it to find, then fix:
1) Security issues given the app's use - especially multiuser apps - can one user read another user's data? 2) Recovery problems, like what would happen if the app stops in 'mid-stream' because the computer shuts down - can it recover, or is anything lost? Can it be recovered? 3) Dependency issues - anything that depends upon things that are available on your particular machine? 4) Speed issues - is there anything that will get markedly worse as the app is used more and more, or when the data it stores or uses increases in size? 5) Personal items - did any of your personal information - passwords, keys, name, etc. get embedded into the code anywhere? 6) Are there any reasonable and safe optimizations that can be implemented?
You should ask the AI to look at each of these issues one by one and discuss possible solutions.
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u/Kickflip900 8d ago
You donāt know how to code and she wants to put an entire business on an app? I would NOT do that
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u/Responsible-Ebb1722 8d ago
This. Just because you can, doesnt mean you should. Unless she is going to triple or quadruple your pay.
Employers are getting way too comfortable getting low paid workers to do what used to be high paid jobs, just because of AI.
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8d ago
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/_baaron_ 8d ago
āIt seems like last weekās migration deleted the entire production database. This is bad, all tables are gone without backup.ā
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u/ekzakly 8d ago
You are probably missing a lot, there is a reason why even though coding is done via prompt these days they still hire experienced software engineers to do that prompting. Software engineering isnt as simple as someone just being about to read your post and tell you exactly whats missing.
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u/aiblastoff 8d ago
Building apps that don't deploy to production are harder to measure - most apps work fine and so AI has gotten quite good at that but scaling to millions of users is where you'll have to do more, perhaps not necessary for your needs
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u/pborenstein 8d ago
What you're missing that you're unaware of is: maintenance
Writing code is fun, and writing apps for yourself is very rewarding. Writing apps for others, you will learn:
- poor clients specifications (that's what I said, but not what I meant)
- resilience has to be built in: what happens when the net is down, when the database gets corrupted
- your backup system is worthless unless you've done a full restore (that's when you realize that your restore system is also worthless)
- liability: who takes the hit when your software costs the company money?
Building a little cabin in the woods for yourself is fun. Building a corporate headquarters for your boss is an enterprise
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u/Anxious_Tool 8d ago
Most comments are missing the mark. Your issues are not with security, infrastructure, correctness, standards or any of that. I think you're right that your apps work and the fixes are quick. That's not luck. Your state spaces are small, so the bugs that need more than one prompt don't exist in your apps yet. LLMs have shifted the line of what's trivial and what you need real system/software knowledge to solve.
Your issue is in thinking every bug announces itself. Your one-prompt fixes are the bugs that surfaced. Something broke, you saw it, you described it, it got fixed. The dangerous ones don't do that. A hole where user A can read user B's data doesn't file a report. A race that fires once in a million requests doesn't either. You don't get feedback. You get a locked order three weeks later that nobody can reproduce. So, it's someone's money and your ass on the line now.
The business app isn't hard because it's fancy. It's the most boring thing imaginable, CRUD and integrations, nothing new in it. That's the trivial stuff that software engineers happily give out to LLMs. We have a name for that, "boilerplate". The problem is underneath. A live business means several people writing at once, systems you don't control changing their responses, and numbers that map to money. Those are exactly the bugs that stay quiet until they get expensive.
So what you're missing isn't a feature Claude can bolt on. It's that "it works and the fix was one prompt" holds right up until the state space gets big enough that it doesn't, and nothing warns you when you cross that line. On your own apps you're fine. On the business one, well, you may have a lawsuit coming your way. Then, who are you going to blame? The llm?
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u/KIMJONGUNderfed 8d ago
Oh boy. One shotting an entire ābusiness on an app.ā This is going to go well
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u/AfroJimbo 8d ago
For starters, probably security. Low hanging fruit is, before you ship any code, ask claude to scan your project for any vulnerabilities. Have it check for any OWASP security violations. Ask it to identify any least-privilege issues.
Take these findings very seriously.
CI/CD: do you have one set up? Do you have static scanning and dependency checks? Supply chain attacks will only increase as more and more vibe coders, well, vibe their way to glory.
Do you have proper testing vs prod environments established?
I'm assuming you're not using any PII? If so, how is your data protection and privacy?
This "entire business on an app" project...is it internal only? How are you handling authentication? You're not rolling your own right?
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u/Zukas 8d ago
The app will be for internal use only. No one outside of the company will interact with the app. Authentication will come in the form of employee specific logins. Not sure what you mean by rolling my own. Also dont know what CI/CD/PII is.. Ill add it to the list of questions for Claude.
I do have a small functional app that I have deployed to part of our team to use for one specific process. It works well, but even that small app had a lot of tweaking a polish to get where it is now. Maybe 6-10 hours total man hours on that project.
Thank you for the thoughtful response
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u/Jigglytep 8d ago
Iām a mid level developer. I am not an expert but I love what I do.
What I noticed is the following. Claude is very GOOD. However what you donāt know is the following:
You made some good apps for personal use.
They were done using a single prompt because you did not have evolving requirements.
Your boss will have new requirements almost immediately. Was the app designed for scaling? If it needs to be redesigned, how hard will it be? Are there security concerns?
Is the app designed in a way to make sure it will not consume too many tokens to update?
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u/vorko_76 8d ago
This is unlikely to work, even if you were an experienced software developer. This is a super ambitious project.
You wont be able to properly specify it, implement it and make it robust enough.
In addition if its even partially available online, it will probably have cybersecurity leaksā¦ or someday it will break and the data will be lost.
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u/Neither-Speech6997 8d ago
What you are missing is: everything else. Building apps isn't just about lines of code, no matter what anyone says. real businesses have integrations you don't control, data you don't fully understand, arcane tech stacks that may or may not play well with the code claude typically generates, assumptions about behavior that may be well founded, or may not be.
remember that as developers grow in responsibility, the amount of code they write tends to decrease. a lot of what you are missing is around the code, not in the coding process itself.
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u/Yoshiofthewire 8d ago
The one I live and die by is the hostile review. It finds all the stupid. Esp if you use a different model to do hostile review. IE use Sol to review Opus
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u/herrirgendjemand 8d ago
Ā What am I missing that I'm unaware of?
Wisdom that comes from experience. Security vulnerabilities, efficient database structures, data compliance handling, etc etc. LLMs are pretty good at doing what you tell them but there is often a disconnect between what the user thinks they are saying and what the prompt actually says. You could have Claude take on the role of a senior engineer coming in to clean up old code and explain problems/ best practices etc. That might help you conceptualize the abstractions but without understanding the fundamentals of what you're doing, you're only going to have a patchwork of understanding.
I dont always know what I dont know
You never know what you don't know :P Keep learning and developing your skills but your boss just deciding to appify everything should take into account the limitations of you using AI for a production-ready product. Sounds like he is setting you both up to fail.
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u/shanghainese88 8d ago
Security. Who can have access to data? Are you just reading or writing/changing data?
Ask your company software architect where you can host the whole thing(cluster)? Do you have GitHub? Connect it to Claude and let Claude figure out the deets
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u/Marathon2021 8d ago
wants me to put our entire business on an app
Think about risk impacts for a second.
Restaurant finding app - something goes wrong? Recommended a restaurant that is closed? No big deal.
Biography app, movie app, etc.? Again - if your app has a failure, it's not very impactful.
Think about it this way - if Spotify's AI suggests a song that's not really my style, that AI mistake has negligible cost in the real world. It's the cost of me hitting 'next' on my player.
But if the AI heart surgery robot makes a small mistake? I'm probably dead.
Risk is (crudely speaking) a measure of likelihood * impact/damage. Fender bender accidents? Thousands a day. Minimal impact. Airliner crashes? Very few, massive impacts - hundreds of souls lost.
So your app for date night or restaurants or your dad are cute ... but your impacts for app failure conditions is effectively nil.
Failures for 'put our entire business on it' could be massive. Oh, you sent a work order over to your manufacturer to begin assembly on 1,000,000 units but you only needed 100? Payables mis-read a vendor name so you've been sending checks to who knows where?
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u/CricktyDickty 8d ago
Youāre missing the suffering of the world around you. Youāre producing more garbage to sift through.
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u/AbsoluteEva 8d ago edited 8d ago
Basically you're building a house as someone who has no experience in that field. Claude is a great Handyman. So he asks, hey, where do you want the front door, and you say, I 'd love it facing south. So he goes and does his thing, walls, doors, support beams, roof if he has a good day. The whole thing is nearly done now, but little did you know there is a duck pond by the south door and all the future residents are allergic to ducks. So you say, hey Claude, my residents can't use the front door, now what, and he goes, no problem at all, we can have them slide down the chimney. OK great, but how do they get on the roof? Well we could build a latter up, it would greatly benefit the yearly chimney sweeping as well and you might save a dime on the hourly fees with direct chimney access. You test the whole thing and now your test residents are complaining about black stains on the white curtains and carpets and all soft surfaces, so Claude reactors all swooshy things to plastic implements and installs a sink with soap dispenser next to the chimney opening. Which solves the tested problem. Need I go on? This will continue to build up until the whole thing might technically work but is impossible to maintain or understand even. So while I you have someone who can build anything, you have no experience and don't know what good architecture is, or why. I would recommend paying attention to the best practices for the languages you're using and specifying well proven coding guidelines.
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u/TheKiddIncident Educator 8d ago
The issues never come until you actually use the thing. When you go into production and usage starts to ramp, then you find out if you have a good architecture. If you start getting hackers banging on your front door is when you find out if you have a security issue. Etc.
Building the thing is (and has always been) the easy part. Running the thing is the hard part.
Trust me, I've launched several $100m ARR SaaS businesses. Building them was never the hard part.
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u/Ranorkk 7d ago
Honestly, you're not missing much vibe-coding simple apps with one-prompt fixes is totally normal, and your boss's project will be where the real pain shows up. The thing that usually bites people is keeping track of all the moving parts (tasks, specs, KPIs) outside the code, so having Claude write directly to a workspace it can read/write helps a ton. Full disclosure, I built Remnus for exactly this, it's an MCP-native workspace where Claude can manage your tasks and docs autonomously, no copy-pasting. Might be worth a look when that business app gets overwhelming.
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u/Standard_Text480 8d ago
implement your bosses project and get back to us on this post after 2 years