Disclosure: I built Cloudish (it started life as the Hal9 Platform). We spent about two years writing the original version by hand. Mostly TypeScript, Express, and Vue 2. Then Vue 2 got deprecated and the migration debt started looking ugly. Out of curiosity I decided to see how far Opus 5.5 could get if we tried to rebuild the whole thing from a clean specification. I had an LLM go through the existing codebase and write a product.md. The point of the file was to describe what the product had to do, not how it was implemented. Things like “should be able to build Docker images, support multiple builds in parallel, keep them isolated, scalable, and secure,” etc. It ended up long and detailed, but deliberately technology-agnostic. I fed that file to Claude Code with Opus 5.5 and told it to rebuild everything from scratch in one shot. It got somewhere in the 60–80% range. The result was actually functional. Then we spent the rest of the time in a much more micromanaging mode with Claude Code: testing, fixing edge cases (for example, Docker builds that died from OOM and didn’t return logs), and finishing the remaining 40%. Still impressive how far the one-shot got. The unexpected part was what the productivity gain unlocked. Because the coding itself moved so fast, we suddenly had time for things that would have been hard to justify before. I used Opus 5.5 (max effort) to build the video intro that’s on cloudish.ai , Three.js with a lot of custom animation. Same pattern: ~60% in one shot, then a lot of polishing. We also had time to properly work on the brand and logo ( cloudish.ai/logo ). Some of that is probably unnecessary, but when the coding is no longer the bottleneck you start having room to care about the other stuff. On cost: last month we used about 15.9 billion input tokens and 99 million output tokens. With caching that came to roughly $10k. Not free, but still way cheaper than the original multi-year effort (which was easily in the $1M+ range for a small team in Seattle). The catch is that writing the product spec isn’t trivial, that took the years of figuring out which features actually matter, where to be careful, and where not to over-engineer. The code generation part, though, is collapsing. It’s been a wild journey. We’re now in the process of scaling the result (Cloudish). If a couple of you are curious and want to try the actual deploy flow, You can tell Claude Code “Deploy this to cloudish.ai” It signs itself up with a small free credit grant (no card), builds server-side, and gives you a live URL. Feedback on the experience would be super helpful. Thank you! submitted by /u/northwestredditor
Originally posted by u/northwestredditor on r/ClaudeCode
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