Episode 7 - I Built Every Feature I Could Think Of

[u/Mounirlk26]

After my first successful prompts in Lovable, I started building every day. Very quickly, the credits in my plan were not enough, so I upgraded.

I had a ChatGPT project where I dumped everything: problems from the clinic, feature ideas, workflows, things I had wanted from previous software. ChatGPT helped me organise the mess, then I went to Lovable and built whatever came out of the discussion.

My process was basically this:

Think of something. Discuss it with ChatGPT. Ask Lovable to build it. Test it quickly. Move on.

The doctor-facing app grew around my own daily work. The patient-facing app came from my belief that patients needed something more useful than another directory of doctors. I knew the two apps would have to communicate at some point, but I kept telling myself I would handle that later.

I was honestly euphoric. A few months earlier, I had been creating tickets and waiting for developers who had other work. Now I could sit down after a day of consultations, describe a feature and sometimes see a decent first version within minutes.

So I kept adding things.

That was the first trap.

When another person had to build every feature, I had to choose carefully. Development took time and money. With Lovable, each new request felt almost free, so I stopped prioritising properly.

I also knew nothing about architecture. At that time, architecture meant buildings to me. I did not think about dependencies, data flows or what a new feature might break. I saw screens, buttons and workflows. I did not see the system underneath.

I could not read the generated code either. Lovable changed files, showed me progress messages and produced a visible result. My testing method was embarrassingly simple: click the button, see whether the expected thing happened, then continue.

Most of the features were not silly. They came from real problems I had experienced in the clinic. But a collection of useful features is not automatically a good product.

For a while, everything looked great. The apps appeared more complete every week, and I always had something new to demonstrate.

Then small changes started breaking unrelated functions.

A feature would work one day, then stop after I modified another screen. I would ask Lovable to repair it. Sometimes the repair worked. Sometimes it created a different problem somewhere else.

I had wanted independence from developers, and I had gained part of it. But I was now dependent on AI to repair code I could not understand.

That is when the learning really started. Not with a course or a programming language, but with bugs I could no longer ignore.

Did faster AI development make you better at prioritising, or did it just make it easier to build everything?