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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine, non-technical, is not making money with his apps. But he's creating a street fighter like game. Just for fun.

So there's that.

He can't exactly release it because he uses a lot of copyrighted stuff. It's also meant only for himself. Though, I've been asking if I can play it, it looks fun.

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I think we desperately need to start differentiating between "is creating" and "has created". I have a couple of "am creating" projects too, but their proximity to "have created" is directly proportional to how much effort and expertise _I_ am bringing, not so much related to the AI's contribution.

I run into this quite a bit. We have users generating MANY apps at our small company (30 FTE), entirely with Claude. It's great to see people mess around and tinker. It's NOT great to see someone with a GH repo that has 750+ commits for what would be MAYBE 1 week of a developers time. SO these are non-developers now spending hours and hours working on software that is probably going to get thrown out.

We're in this spot where we don't know when to cut our losses on projects like this. (Is it even viable as production software? Does it currrently do what it's supposed to, or are they adding new features? Is there a return on continued development efforts?)

None of these apps they have built are seeing any major usage, and I don't think a single one is what I would call "done" (There was a gold rush stage at the beginning of 2026 where senior leadership wanted everyone to spend some time messing around with Claude). Unfortunately, they never told anyone when to stop messing around with Claude, so the ROI is ever diminishing.

Update: he's done with it now. It's quite a fun game. He has some game balancing to do still as I button mashed through the 2D fighting game.

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