I believe this is actually where Gen AI tools like Claude.AI come into their own. For example, in the past few weeks we needed to plan a complex integration project with both frontend and backend integrations, dependencies on data provided in backend and frontend, need to send data backwards and forwards from the 3rd party and our backend, etc, and in total probably a half-dozen viable alternative ways of doing it.
Using Claude plus detailed prompting with a lot of contextual business knowledge, it was possible to build a realistic working prototype of each possible approach as separate Git branches and easily demo them within about two days. Doing this also captured multiple hidden constraints aka "gotchas" in the 3rd party APIs.
Building each of these prototypes in the working Java codebase would have been a massive, time-consuming and pointless activity when a decision still needed to be made on which approach to go with. But getting Claude AI to whip up a simplified replica of our business systems using realistic interfaces and then integrate the 3rd party was super-easy. Generating alternative variants was as simple as running a script to consolidate the source files and getting Claude to generate the new variant, almost without any coding needed.
And because this prototype was built in few html and js files and run using node js, there is literally zero possibility of it becoming part of the production codebase.
Using Claude plus detailed prompting with a lot of contextual business knowledge, it was possible to build a realistic working prototype of each possible approach as separate Git branches and easily demo them within about two days. Doing this also captured multiple hidden constraints aka "gotchas" in the 3rd party APIs.
Building each of these prototypes in the working Java codebase would have been a massive, time-consuming and pointless activity when a decision still needed to be made on which approach to go with. But getting Claude AI to whip up a simplified replica of our business systems using realistic interfaces and then integrate the 3rd party was super-easy. Generating alternative variants was as simple as running a script to consolidate the source files and getting Claude to generate the new variant, almost without any coding needed.
And because this prototype was built in few html and js files and run using node js, there is literally zero possibility of it becoming part of the production codebase.