ryado

I'm an experienced backend engineer; frontend has always been my bottleneck. I've been experimenting with AI tools to bridge this gap, and my recent experience with Vercel v0 was notable.

Fueled by a desire to impress a friend (and some alcohol) last weekend, I built a feature-rich internal app for his business; ~ think a feature-rich time tracker with auth, roles, export, etc. To keep the momentum going, I bypassed the rate limits and spent about $50 on a Pro sub and credits over two days. The result: a working MVP delivered and in use by Monday.

The speed was incredible, not just code generation, but the entire dev-to-deploy cycle. v0 instantly solved the "blank canvas" problem for me.

The sober question now is: was that the best use of $50? The backend I could have built in a similar timeframe, so the value was entirely in accelerating the UI/design for me.

I'm trying to assess the landscape of tools for developers like me. My research so far:

Claude: Intrigued, but pricing is unclear.

Copilot: I use it daily at work for backend, but it feels weak for generating complex, well-designed UI components.

v0 vs. Bolt: v0 felt miles ahead for the initial UI generation.

My question for HN:

For a developer whose main weakness is frontend design, is there anything that truly matches v0's 0-to-1 speed right now? Or is it in a class of its own, and the ~$50 cost for an MVP is simply the new price of admission for this kind of leverage in my case?

I think v0 is an amazing product, but I'm pragmatic about tools. I’ve just learned to treat companies the same way they treat customers: always squeeze the juice, move on when the value drops.

Curious to hear what workflows others have found effective.