Hey everyone, I need a real sanity-check on my workflow, because I feel like I’m being scammed. 😅 To get some contacts every single day on X, Insta, and TikTok, I see people posting demo videos of insanely cool, bespoke software, sleek data visualizations, and full-stack side projects they supposedly “built in 2 hours completely with AI.” It makes me hyped and really optimistic for the future, and for tech as a whole. Howevr when I actually sit down to build anything beyond a MVP or lightweight component, I hit an invisible wall or something…. Ok if I had to break it down, I’ll first get honey potted, or stuck in the honeymoon phase. I’ll start building with Claude and/or Codex (depending on the project but at this point they’re pretty much the same). I’ll go through the steps of setting up the scaffold, initial architecture, and base feature set goes insanely fast. Then boom at some point I’ll hit a wall; or like a 80/20 trap, I’ll try pushing the project into a complete, polished, end-to-end product, but it never gets there. Then I end up in a token burn hell where I’m just burning through tokens, and context windows while the project completely stalls on the roadmap. I’m following standard prompt engineering practices, using system prompts, modular files, etc., but it feels like the model gets “tired” or bogged down once the codebase grows past a certain complexity. For the folks in here who are actually shipping full applications to production using LLMs : Is everyone on social media just showing off slick 30-second prototypes that are actually broken under the hood? What is your actual stack/workflow for pushing past that mid-project context degradation? Are you using spec-driven development (like custom system prompts, codebase indexing tools, or sub-agent architecture), or are you still dropping back into hand-coding the last 20%? Would appreciate any tips, workflow breakdowns, or brutal honesty. Cheers! Sidenote: if you guys have built any cool projects with AI, and are willing to share with me please feel free to :) I love stuff like that. submitted by /u/NoPower5561
Originally posted by u/NoPower5561 on r/ArtificialInteligence