I have not seen an example of anything that should cost six figures done by traditional development done using AI tools.
If you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know how to do it. Learn how to do it.
Half the early startup code I’ve seen delivered by agencies can best be described as performance art.
At least with AI delivered code the most likely output is some middle of the road boilerplate.
What do you think that AI was trained on?
Yes, many things can do rapid prototyping, especially for CRUD apps. And yes, professional programmers can go very fast with the right tech. Unfortunately in most cases, programmers use what they know, because discovering the tool that already does 99% of what you’re customer needs is already a lot of work.
So people who are out of the loop clearly won’t know about Bolt or Claude.
If a scammer wants to, they can flee from all repercussions without building anything, even if all the AI tools were available to them. While Josh Adler is just one person, there are multiple such people in Dubai who've done the same to thousands of victims. Dubai is notorious for attracting those types.
Now you don't need to pay huge sums of money to these consultant grifters any more as now AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, Bolt, Lovable and Replit can build these apps and websites for you almost for free.
I nearly signed off a six figure deal for someone to make an app for us and we instead went down the AI tools route after some evaluation and prototyping and we saved a lot of money on this to get it built.
This was very sad to read and I wish these people found these tools at all or even sooner rather than plowing their money into scammers.