I Built a Mobile IDE With ~90% AI-Generated Code — It Still Took 6 Months
I recently shipped a mobile IDE on Google Play. ~90% of the code was generated with AI tools. I handled architecture, product decisions, testing and iteration.
From the outside, that sounds like it should be fast. In reality, it still took around 6 months of continuous work.
What AI actually helped with
AI significantly accelerated boilerplate code, UI implementation, feature scaffolding, refactoring suggestions and debugging assistance. It reduced the time spent on writing code line by line.
But what still took time
Even with heavy AI usage, a large amount of time went into system design and architecture decisions, ensuring correctness across features, testing UI behavior across edge cases, fixing inconsistent AI-generated logic, and integrating complex workflows—SSH, Git and remote execution.
The key reality
For complex applications, AI doesn't remove the hard parts of development. It shifts the workload. Instead of writing code, you spend more time validating outputs, correcting assumptions, defining constraints clearly, and repeatedly testing real-world behavior.
What I learned
AI today is extremely good at speeding up implementation, but it is still far from replacing system-level thinking, product decisions, correctness guarantees and end-to-end testing. In practice, it feels less like "AI builds software for you" and more like AI increases your throughput as a developer.
The app
The result is a mobile IDE with SSH remote development environments, Git workflow support, mobile code editing and AI-assisted coding features. It's live on Google Play—download it from the Download page.
Final thought
AI didn't reduce the need for developers. It changed what developers spend time on.
This is the origin story behind why the editor, SSH, terminal and Git had to be built as one system. Read Why Existing Flutter Code Editors Broke Down and Why I Decided to Build a Mobile IDE Instead of Another AI App. For the product overview, see NimoteCode Features and Mobile IDE.
About the author · Building NimoteCode, a mobile-first IDE built with Flutter and Rust. Follow the project on DEV.to · GitHub · X.