I made every one of these, and more than once
Before you open any dev tool,
I want to talk about mindset.
Because the traps I fell into
had almost nothing to do with technology.
They were all about mindset.
This is the most common one, and the most fatal.
"I want to build a platform.
It needs login, search, a rating system,
chat, payments, notifications..."
And then you never finish.
Anthropic (the company behind Claude)
says the same thing in its own engineering write-ups:
In software this is called an MVP,
Minimum Viable Product.
Which means: build the one feature at the core first,
confirm people want it, then add the rest slowly.
The first version of NaLi Match had three things:
post a request, browse artists, get in touch.
No payments, no ratings, no chat.
But that was enough to connect artists with customers.
While you are building, something pops into your head:
"Hey, it would be nice to add feature X here."
So you go build it.
You finish and think of another one, build it, think of another, build that too.
Developers call this scope creep.
Your project keeps growing,
while the core feature never gets done properly.
"One more tweak."
"The color of this button is a bit off."
"I am not happy with this layout."
So you keep tweaking, and tweaking,
and three months go by,
and the thing is still sitting on your laptop,
with nobody having seen it.
It beats 100% perfect and never shipped, ten thousand times over.
Once it is live, users tell you what needs fixing,
and that feedback is far more accurate than your own guesses.
In the AI era this is no longer a problem.
One broken line used to mean a full day of debugging.
Now you paste the error message into AI
and it fixes it in seconds.
Anthropic's own engineering team keeps pointing at the same practice:
So do not be afraid of getting it wrong.
When it breaks, let AI fix it. If it cannot, start that piece over.
Starting over costs almost nothing in the AI era.
A lot of people open Claude and say
"build me a website"
and AI does build one,
except it looks nothing like what you pictured,
or you were really just waiting to see what it would pull out of the hat.
Is that still something you made?
The way I think it should go
is to spend time talking it through with AI first:
what you are building, who it is for, what the core feature is,
what tech it uses, how the data gets stored.
That conversation
is what makes your own thinking clear.
Plenty of times you think you know,
and only after talking do you see you never worked it out.
The biggest thing I learned over three years:
But every failure moved me one step closer.
Next episode is about talking product architecture with AI,
including frontend, backend and databases, the basics you need to know.
MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. Build the one feature at the core of your product first, confirm someone wants it, then add the rest slowly. Beginners get stuck on "finish every feature, then launch", and it never gets finished.
Scope creep is when the boundaries keep spreading. You think of a new feature while building, you add it, and the core never gets finished properly. The simplest fix is to write new ideas on a list and come back to them once the core is stable. Usually more than half of them turn out to be unnecessary.
Because something 100% perfect that never ships has no users and gets you no feedback. Once it is live, users tell you directly what needs fixing, and that beats your own guesses. Waiting until you are happy with everything usually means you have been stalling for months.
No. The cost of a broken line of code is close to zero now. Paste the error into AI and it fixes it in seconds, and if it cannot, you start that piece over. The point is not avoiding mistakes, it is having a way to verify and repair fast.
Say it that way and you usually get something nothing like what you pictured. Spend time talking it through with AI first: what you are building, who it is for, what the core feature is. That conversation is what makes your own thinking clear.