I built a livestreaming app that couldn’t livestream.

1/ Before AI, I used to hire developers on Upwork to build app ideas.

Every small change meant:

You could burn months and tens of thousands of dollars just to learn the idea sucked.

2/ Then ChatGPT came out.

I downloaded Xcode, opened a blank project, and genuinely thought:

“Holy shit, I can finally build this myself.”

That feeling lasted about a day.

Every time the chat got too long, I’d start a new one and explain the entire app again.

It felt like onboarding a new engineer every night.

Except it forgot everything by morning.

3/ Then I tried the one-prompt app builders.

I asked one to build me a livestreaming app.

A few minutes later I had profiles, chat, a beautiful feed, fake streamers everywhere.

It looked incredible.

I asked what video streaming service it was using.

None.

I had successfully built a livestreaming app that could not livestream.

That basically sums up the problem.

AI got insanely good at making the first version look finished.

Actually finishing the product is a completely different problem.

4/ Good engineers don’t use AI by saying “build the whole product” either.

They give it scoped problems, work through edge cases, review the output, test it, then move on.

AI makes every step dramatically faster.

It doesn’t make the steps disappear.

5/ That’s the idea behind X1.

Until you have something you can actually ship to the App Store.

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