I have built and run two products on my own: cvnepal.com, a CV builder and jobs board, and beemaportal.com, a guide to life insurance in Nepal. Most of the code in both was written by an AI. I direct it, I review what it writes, and I run what comes out.
This is what building software this way is like, from someone who came to it from the infrastructure and operations side.
The setup
Both products run on one VPS server. When I push a change to GitHub, an automated pipeline builds it and copies it onto the server.
It is a small, ordinary setup. One person can hold all of it in his head, which matters when he is also the only one who will fix it.
What my job actually is
People picture typing “build me a CV website” and watching one appear. For anything you would put in front of the public, it doesn’t work like that. My part has three pieces.
Direction. I decide what gets built and in what order, and I write down the rules. Each project has a file the AI reads at the start of every session: what the product is, how it is built, what not to touch. A second file records where the last session stopped. The AI starts each session remembering nothing of the one before, so those two files are its memory, and keeping them accurate is my job.
Review. I read what it changes before it goes live. I can’t write a React component from scratch, but I am learning enough to judge one: how a request moves through the application, where the data is kept, what runs on the server and what runs in the browser. That learning has been the real work.
Operation. When something breaks in production, it is mine. The AI does not get the phone call.
What carried over from payments
Habits, mostly. Payment systems teach you to ask two questions about every change: what exactly does it touch, and how do I undo it? I ask the AI the same two. It is fast and it is confident, and confident is not the same as correct.
The other habit is not trusting what you have not watched work. A change is finished when I have seen it run on the live site, not when the AI says it is done.
What it hasn’t solved
Writing the software turned out to be the easier half. Neither product earns money yet. Getting people to find them and use them is work the AI can help with but cannot do for me, and it is the work I am starting now.
The AI also does not decide what is worth building, who it is for, or what to charge. Those calls are mine, and so are their consequences.
If you are thinking of building this way
The skill that matters is not typing code. It is knowing what done looks like, reading a change with suspicion, and owning what happens after it ships. Anyone who has run systems for a living already has most of that.
Both products are live. If you try cvnepal.com or beemaportal.com and something is wrong, tell me. The code isn’t mine, but the outages are.
Drafted with AI and edited by me, which seemed the only honest way to write this one.