What surprised you most when AI let you build your first app?
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Coming from a non-technical background, using AI to code an app felt like magic at first. But I quickly realized that getting a feature to work on the "happy path" is only 20% of the battle handling edge cases broken internet and edge-state bugs is where things get genuinely messy.
You suddenly become the manager of a codebase you barely understand. For other non traditional builders here what was the harshed reality check you hit after launching your first AI-assisted project?
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the biggest surprise is that making something work is much easier than making it reliable. I could get a feature running with AI, but understanding why it broke later was a completely different challenge.
the one that got me was emails.. the happy path sends once, but a rerun after a crash could send the same trial email again. now the row carries a sent-at stamp and the job skips anything already stamped. do you keep notes the agent reads at the start of each session, or does it rediscover the codebase every time?
the surprising bit for me was how fast a demo looks done versus how long the edge cases take. what was the first thing that broke once someone else used yours?
I've been writing software for 27 years, so I came at it from the other side. What I see looks a lot like the dot-com days. Products built on a real understanding of the tech and products that just happened to work look the same on the happy path. The difference shows up when more people use them, and security is usually the first thing to break.
For me the check was a number. Counting the song requests in my app's early weeks, a third had failed, 55 of 172. Crashes were not the problem at all: 25 failed during billing outages over three days, 24 were refused by the music model's content filter, 6 were other. For 16 users the very first song failed, and 9 of them never got one. None of that is visible on the happy path. Today a refused request gets reworded and retried once, other failures get up to three attempts, and a second engine sits behind the first. The edges were mostly not in my code, they were in everything my code depends on.