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.

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.

I have not seen an example of anything that should cost six figures done by traditional development done using AI tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

What does that even mean, honestly? Because I would argue that a salesperson who doesn’t accurately represent the product or service they’re selling is a conman, and I think there is a fair bit of established law on the subject.

In my model of the world, there is exactly one country in the world that values skilled labor, the US. The highly skilled 100k people from abroad are firewalled from it by the visa regime and the fact that most people with money have IQ too low to effectively work remotely (so they have to work in person to be able to assess the vibes of a person using their lizard brain).

The 200k kids are from good families (hence psychologically stable) joining established orgs where the important thing is to be a good cog shapeable into a decent engineer rather than just the ability to deliver.

These agencies usually don’t have lawyers, so new contracts are full of exploitable holes. You say “we’ll build an e-commerce app with inventory management”, without specifying exactly what inventory management means, your client will start experimenting on your dime and can easily make it seem like it’s your fault. The larger the client, the worse this becomes.

You should always, always make your contracts as specific as possible, but this requires consulting work to nail down requirements before a contract is finalized, and that has a cost, but clients don’t value this and want you “the expert” to magically fill in the blanks in their ideas like an LLM, for free.

Another issue is your team. You might be very competent, but your team might not, hiring is hard. I once had to fire half of my team and build a 6 month client project in 1 month at great cost to my work / life balance because they were just unable to make meaningful progress. Granted, my leadership was not top notch there (being too busy to check on progress and trusting standups is a bad strategy) and I learned a lot, adjusted accordingly.

These are a few counter examples, but I still believe if this is a pattern then you’re a crook.

    In the misfortune of our best friends, we often find something that is not displeasing.

My guess is definitely not.

Is this an example of a scam or a legit app? Sounds nice but not profitable.