Agreed with
@jsgrrchg
(For reference, I’ve managed 100 people orgs in software engineering and have experience at FAANG companies)
I’d recommend picking up two $20/month subscriptions: one for Anthropic so you can use Claude and Claude Code, and the other for Cursor.
Use Claude to shape your idea, identify your MVP (think minimum “beta” if this term is unfamiliar), and have it build a step by step plan. You’ll feed this plan to Claude Code and/or one of the LLMs in Cursor.
And if you’re serious about making this app successful, I’d start by having it do some competitive analysis and help you identify your revenue stream, costs, etc
For LLMs, I generally use:
- Sonnet 4.5 for regular coding
- Opus 4.6 for trickier problems and architecture
- Codex for advanced debugging and perf optimization
Depending on how simple your app is (and I’d highly recommend starting very simply and iterate), you’ll probably have something working in under an hour.
Software engineering as a profession still has a few years left and knowing what good code looks like is critical, but AI orchestration is a key skill that’s rapidly growing in the bigger tech companies.
That’s not to say that learning Swift so you can hand write code is a waste of time, but if this is a one-off project and you have limited time (which most people do), then you’ll likely get much further using AI to complement your traditional software studies.
