Spent the last few weeks building three connected apps and shared microservices with Lovable/Cursor. The first 80% went shockingly smooth, the demo-stage stuff always does. Then real usage started, and the integration between services and the admin dashboard started throwing constant sync errors. A few different AI coding tools could patch individual symptoms but never quite nail the root cause.
For anyone who's taken an AI-built app past the demo stage: what was the first thing that actually broke once real users or data hit it, auth, data consistency, service integration, something else? And did you end up digging into the code yourself, or bring in outside help to sort it out?
AI has a very problem very frustating to me. It just suddenly forgets what was the task. For example, once I was developing some application and I asked AI to improve certain button colors, etc. it did that very nicely. But, I did not asked you to change the background color and make it white all of a sudden.
It did many moe such things previously. Whenever I ask it to change or add X, something else changes too which wasn't required at all. For me, it also changed a bit of functionality earlier. Have you ever been in the same situation?
My feed was full of "passive income" gurus, so I jumped in. I spent weeks designing logos, tweaking my website, picking colors, and building a fancy brand identity for a new project.
I felt like a real founder. But when I looked at my actual income, 90% of my earnings came from one basic thing: reaching out directly to people, listening to their problems, and offering to help.
The beautiful website didn't make me a dollar. I wasn't building because customers were begging for my product; I was playing business because I wanted to feel productive.
That lesson stuck with me. Now, before I spend a single hour on branding or tech, I ask: "Can I get one paying customer for this idea today using just a simple message?" If I can't, I don't build it.
I dug up some old notes from when I first started building software, and honestly, reading it made me laugh. Back then I had these rigid ideas about how things "should" be done like refusing to use certain third party tools or trying to code everything from scratch to keep it pure. Fast forward to today and I ve broken almost every single one of those rules just to survive and actually ship things. The market teaches you pretty fast that idealism doesn't pay the bills.
Have your early business rules survived contact with actual customers or did you have to throw them out too?
It s so annoying when you feed an error to an agent it fixes one thing, breaks another, and then reverts right back to the first issue two turns later.
Once the chat gets flooded with raw logs it feels like it completely forgets the big picture and just starts guessing.
Do you just wipe the chat completely at that point or is there a prompt trick that actually gets it to stop and rethink?
