Building with AI: How do you know when it's time to update your code?
by•
I'm not the most technical person here, and I'm learning as I build.
AI coding tools have made it possible to build things I wouldn't have attempted on my own. But something I've been wondering about is what happens after the code works.
Frameworks change, dependencies get updated, and security vulnerabilities are discovered. How do you know when your code needs attention if everything appears to be running fine?
Do you regularly ask your AI coding tools to review your codebase? Rely on GitHub security alerts? Or follow some kind of maintenance schedule?
I'm especially curious how other founders who are learning as they build handle this without constantly changing code that already works.
11 views
Replies
For a small product, I'd sort updates by who forces them rather than keep a schedule. The ones that come with a deadline find you anyway: the app stores raise the minimum SDK every year, and AI vendors retire models. My previous app died partly because the music model behind an unofficial API got switched off and everything built on it stopped. So the parts I watch closely are the outside services I depend on, and I keep each one behind a single file so swapping it is a small job. Security alerts on the dependencies are worth turning on, they're free. Beyond that, if the code works and nothing outside is changing, leaving it alone is usually the right call.
I usually update when there’s a clear security issue or a dependency change that could break things and test the changes in a separate branch before merging them into the main codebase
I don't read code line by line either. Honestly, at the pace I ship, I can't review all of it anymore, so I lean on end to end tests. My main project has about 150 Playwright tests that click through the real screens, and I rerun them after any update.
Errors from all my products go to one self-hosted GlitchTip, so if something quietly breaks in production, I usually hear about it. And my agent can't tell me "fixed" without saying what it actually checked. A hook blocks the reply otherwise.