AI cannot do anything meaningful beyond basic functions and boilerplatey stuff with moderate difficulty. Don't believe me? Ask your AI model to generate a production grade typescript 5.x application with a tsconfig.json file that uses ts-node instead of tsx with path aliases configured and uses biome 2.x for linting formatting. Add vitest for testing library with graceful shutdowns that handle SIGTERM and SIGINT events from your express server wih an ioredis connection that can be shut down gracefully along with using pg-promise to open a postgresql connection. Make it use @dotenvx/dotenvx for managing development, testing, staging and production environments. Add commitlint to ensure all git commit messages adhere to a specific format. Ask it to add lefthook along with a configuration file for running, lint format and test jobs on every commit. Now add pino and pino-http with custom serializers to redact passwords, tokens and apiKeys from the logging output. Development version of the logs should be pretty printed, production version of the logs should be optimized JSON sent to a cloudwatch log transport. Add CORS to handle frontends running on localhost:5173 for development, https://example.com for production and add helmet for managing security loopholes. Add CSRF protection to all POST, PATCH and PUT routes in the application. Generate 4 different docker files, one for development, one for staging, one for testing and one for production. The development and testing versions should run a separate postgres and redis container with whom we have seamless networking setup. Development versions use self signed SSL certificates at every level. The staging and production environments should connect with an actual elasticache and RDS instance supplied. Both staging and production use actual SSL certificates. We also need Github actions for CI / CD with templates for pull requests, feature requests and tasks to run tests on PR with dependabot updates completely disabled. We need NGINX running as forward proxy to this endpoint with SSL certificates generated by letsencrypt that are auto rotated. Talk to me when your AI model can generate 10% of this setup
I sincerely hope that isn't your prompt. These boilerplate tasks are easy for an AI. You just can't expect to it to get it right all in one shot. You certainly wouldn't do all that in a single commit or even PR.
if you are going to prompt this over the next 50 hours with 300 different prompts, you might as well build it without using AI. that was the point I was trying to make
15 years ago I made, and even sold, games that I spent less than 50 hours making. But that's with the advantage of starting with a generic template that already held all the game menu structure (achievements, preferences, etc.), and even then the games weren't very good.
If you can make a "production grade … application" (irregardless of language details or anything else) in 50 hours, by hand and without AI assistance, you're an unusual person. Most "agile" places I've been, even a single sprint is longer than that.
I'm pretty much doing that in a containerized deployment for project I'm looking to open source soon called webbin:
Technology Stack
Frontend: React 18 + TypeScript + Vite + TailwindCSS
Backend: Node.js + Express + Clustering
Database: PostgreSQL 16 with performance optimization
Cache: Redis 7 with active defragmentation
Security: HTTPS/TLS with container-to-container encryption
Orchestration: Docker Compose with health checks
Monitoring: Built-in APM and performance tracking
Services
webbin-frontend - React TypeScript frontend with HTTPS
webbin-backend - Node.js API with clustering support
webbin-postgres - PostgreSQL 16 with performance tuning
webbin-redis - Redis 7 with advanced caching
webbin-certbot - SSL Certificate management, openssl for dev, LE for production
webbin-testrunner - Testbot
webbin-nginx - Proxy
Access Points
Frontend: https://localhost:5173
Backend API: https://localhost:3001
Health Check: https://localhost:3001/api/health
I'm around 15k LOC, all built in ~80 hours of interactive prompting mostly with Claude 4.0 Sonnet, then some Gemini 2.5 Pro for more devops activities.
