Blog
Field notes
Occasional, practical writing on shipping AI-built software.
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You have no tests. Here's what breaks first.
AI writes the feature and skips the safety net. Everything looks fine until the day you change something — and the first thing to break is the thing you weren't looking at.
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Your app isn't slow. One of these five things is.
Slowness feels mysterious and almost never is. In AI-built apps it's nearly always the same handful of causes — and each one has a boring, known fix.
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Where should you host the app your AI built?
Vercel, Railway, Fly, Cloudflare, AWS — every tutorial names a different winner. Here's the short version of how the choice is actually made, in plain language.
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Why your AI app got a $5,000 API bill — and how to cap it
No rate limit, no usage cap, one loop — and a hobby project turns into a five-figure invoice overnight. Here's how the spend runs away, and how to stop it.
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Is your database public? How to check in two minutes.
Supabase and Firebase make it dangerously easy to ship a database anyone can read. Here's a two-minute test to see if yours is exposed.
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Your OpenAI key is in your GitHub repo. Here's what happens next.
AI tools love pasting secret keys straight into your code. If that code is on GitHub, bots will find it within minutes — and the bill is yours.
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The 10-point checklist before your AI app goes live
The gap between "it works on my machine" and "it's safe in production" is bigger than it looks. Here's what we check on every AI-built app before it ships.
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