I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they don't belong). Unfortunately, there's not that much self-retrospection on these aspects if you ask about the quality of the code or if there are any better ways of doing it. Of course, if you pick up that something is in the wrong spot and prompt better, they'll pick up on it immediately.
I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. (Previously, as a heavy LLM user including coding tasks, I was averaging maybe $20 a month.)
Initial cost was around $20 USD, which later grew to (mostly polishing) $40 with some manual work.
I've intentionally picked up simple stack: html+js+php.
A couple of things:
* I'd say I'm happy about the result from product's perspective * Codebase could be better, but I could not care less about in this case * By default, AI does not care about security unless I specifically tell it * Claude insisted on using old libs. When I've specifically told it to use the latest and greatest, it upgraded them but left code that works just with an old version. Also it mixed latest DaisyUI with some old version of tailwindcss :)
On one hand it was super easy and fun to do, on the other hand if I was a junior engineer, I bet it would have cost more.