The generated version takes 30 minutes. Making it usable by a person who is not you takes about a week.
Same feature, same repo. That ratio has not moved for me in a year of building this way.
The week is where the money is. It never appears on a roadmap.
What is actually in that week
A prompt describes the happy path. Someone types a thing, the thing works, the screen shows a result. That is the version that comes back.
Then you open it the way a stranger would.
- The list with nothing in it. No rows, no illustration, no "add your first one", just a header and grey space.
- The half second before data arrives. Layout jumps, or a spinner sits in the middle of a page that had a shape a moment ago.
- The request that failed. Usually nothing at all, because the prompt never mentioned failure.
- The name that is 80 characters long, and the one that is a single letter.
- The person without permission, who gets a broken screen instead of a sentence.
Generate six screens in an hour and five of them come apart the moment a list is empty. Nothing throws. Nothing is missing from the code. The second panel is just what everybody sees on their first day.
Why it is the entire job now
Everyone has the 30 minutes. Your competitor has them, the person who thought of this last week has them, and so does the one who will clone you in March.
So the 30 minutes are worth roughly nothing. They stopped being a moat the moment they got cheap.
What is left is the boring part. Empty states, focus order, the error copy that says what to do next, the thing that stops the page jumping. Slow, unglamorous, and hard to prompt your way through, because you have to have seen a real person get stuck to know what to fix.
That is POLI$$$HING, and nobody is selling you a tool for it.
A pass that takes ten minutes
Open the app with a fresh account and no data. Not your dev account with 40 seeded rows, a real empty one.
Walk every screen. Turn the network off halfway. Paste a paragraph into a field built for a word. Log in as someone with fewer permissions than you.
Write down what you see. You will have a list, and it will be longer than you want.
Most of it is an hour of work each. That is the annoying part, and also why so few people bother.
I wrote up the failure patterns in more detail here, my own post so weigh it accordingly: https://slimsnap.ai/blog/ai-generated-ui-problems
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