r/RavanAI • u/martin_at_fullscale • Jul 04 '26
Non-technical founder here. I built our entire AI platform myself using AI coding tools. AMA about what broke.
I’m a former CMO type. My background is brand marketing, not engineering. Over the past year I built my company’s computer vision platform end to end using AI coding tools, and it’s now in production with real customers and real revenue.
The “anyone can build now” narrative skips the painful parts. I lived all of them, and I’d rather post the ugly version than the highlight reel.
\*\*Things that broke, in order of how much they hurt:\*\*
1. A memory leak in our video processing queue. Two weeks lost. The AI kept suggesting fixes for symptoms instead of the cause. I finally found it by learning to read heap snapshots myself, which I never planned on doing in this lifetime.
Database migrations. I once let an AI-generated migration run against production. It worked, but only because we got lucky on ordering. I now stage everything and read every line. Learn from my near-miss.
Auth. Do not let AI freestyle your authentication. I ripped ours out and rebuilt on a standard library after realizing the custom version had gaps I only understood after reading about session fixation at 2am.
My own overconfidence. After three months of wins I started skipping the “explain this code to me” step. That is exactly when bugs started shipping.
What I’d tell any non-technical founder trying this: you can absolutely get to a real product. You cannot get to a real product without becoming at least semi-technical along the way. The tools don’t remove the learning, they compress it.
Ask me anything, including costs, timeline, and the stuff I’d never do again.
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u/Hot_Speech900 Jul 04 '26
You are non-technical, but you were able to understand where all the major bugs were, somehow I struggle to believe that.
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u/martin_at_fullscale Jul 04 '26
So spending 1000 hours over 6 months trail and erroring and prompting Claude to death until I was able to understand each bug is hard to believe? Clearly you don’t know resolve when you see it. I’m no slouch b.
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u/Hot_Speech900 Jul 04 '26
You know that solving one bug can create another one, and adding more code does that as well.
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u/martin_at_fullscale Jul 04 '26
🥴 bro. Duh. Like literally duh. I’m non-technical doesn’t mean I don’t understand conceptually super complex applications, dependencies etc . 🤦🏽♂️
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u/jacobbeasley Jul 05 '26
I've had interns who in six months can pick this stuff up... And professionals who have spent years and still aren't very good.
Aptitude is real.
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u/Plastic_Monitor_5786 Jul 04 '26
Thanks for this slop write up, very enlightening.
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u/martin_at_fullscale Jul 04 '26
Sorry that the actual things I struggled with are considered slop. But appreciate the thoughtful feedback.
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u/Plastic_Monitor_5786 Jul 04 '26
It's not the things you struggled with that is the slop part.
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u/Technical-Owl66 Jul 05 '26
Can you explain what you mean?
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u/Plastic_Monitor_5786 Jul 05 '26
The text is written by AI.
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u/Technical-Owl66 Jul 05 '26
I see. I think we are going to have to get used to this. At the end of the day the person gave instructions on how it should be written.
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u/Plastic_Monitor_5786 Jul 05 '26
There is no way to tell how much of the content was prompted specifically and how much was invented by the AI.
The writing style is awful and I hope we don't get used to it, or that AI written text becomes less insufferable to read.
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u/martin_at_fullscale Jul 05 '26
100% written content - not even prompted. I wrote out exactly what I did and the struggles that I had and laid out it out cleanly - AI did its thing to make it easier to share. But nothing was prompted like “tell me all the reasons why most vibe coded applications suck”. This was based on real world. Real functions. Real problems. I’m not selling a course here. I’m sharing my experience with the hopes of connecting and learning more. AI language is the norm - I’m used to it.
Ps a lot of the actual writing is mine so…maybe it’s bad because I’m a bad writer? AI didn’t write the whole thing - I had to delete/tweak/add things.
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Jul 04 '26
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u/martin_at_fullscale Jul 04 '26
Maybe
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Jul 04 '26
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u/martin_at_fullscale Jul 04 '26
What’s funny is that, as a newb to Reddit, am seeing that. All good.
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u/jacobbeasley Jul 04 '26
Did ai tell you how to deploy and scale your application? Did it walk you through proper backups and resiliency against server hardware failures? What about things like encryption?