𝗔𝗜 𝗪𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲, 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗜𝘁 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗲
I built an AI slide generator using Velobase Harness.
You type a topic and get a presentation. The AI wrote an outline, made the slides, and exported a file. In a demo, it looked finished.
It was not finished.
The demo only proved one user could make one deck one time. A real product is different. It must handle 100 people at once. It must bill users correctly. It must recover when a step fails. It must export a PPTX file that actually works in PowerPoint.
The AI did not add these things because I did not tell it to.
When you build with AI, the hard part is not describing the feature. The hard part is defining what "done" means.
I used Velobase Harness for the boring parts:
- Auth and payments
- Credits and admin
- Database and queues
- Object storage and deployment
This let me focus the AI on the only part that belonged to me: the PPT generation.
Here are four ways "looks done" and "is done" differ:
Concurrency AI thinks if it works once, it is complete. But 100 users need a pipeline. You must split tasks into plan, slide, and finalize queues. You must generate each slide as its own job so workers can scale.
Billing A real product needs a state machine. You must reserve credits first. You must settle against what was actually spent. You must refund on failure and pause when a balance runs out.
Self-review If a system retries a task silently, the user sees a spinner. To make this a feature, you must show the progress. Show the user when the system is "generating," "checking," or "redrawing."
Export A slide might look perfect in a browser but break in a PPTX file. Your requirement must be: the export must match the web preview.
The lesson is simple. AI is good at writing code. It does not know what makes a product shippable. It treats a local demo as a system.
You must provide the engineering boundaries and the failure cases. Faster shipping comes from sharper input, not less thinking.
If you built something with AI, what was the hardest gap between a demo and a real product?
Source: https://dev.to/velobasex/ai-can-write-the-code-it-cant-tell-you-when-the-product-is-done-4oh6
Optional learning community: https://t.me/GyaanSetuAi