๐ ๐ฆ๐ต๐ถ๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฎ ๐ฃ๐ฎ๐ถ๐ฑ ๐๐ ๐ช๐ฒ๐ฏ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐น๐ฎ๐๐ ๐ญ๐ฌ% ๐ณ๐ฒ๐น๐ ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ณ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ป๐.
I recently turned an internal skill into a real website. It is not a demo or a prototype. It is a live site where users sign in, pay, and get results.
The product is Hidden Stems. It is a Bazi chart and reading tool.
Building this meant more than just making a form. I had to handle:
- Sign in and account flows
- Stripe checkout and webhooks
- Database persistence
- Vertex AI generation
- Vercel deployment
- SEO and environment variables
- Error states for payments
In the past, the last 10% of a project felt scary. I would reach 90% and stop. The remaining work felt boring and fragile. Deployment, configuration, and testing often killed my momentum.
This year, things changed.
I used Codex to help me navigate the technical hurdles. When I faced complex cloud setups or Stripe integrations, I did not feel stuck. Instead of fighting documentation for hours, I used the CLI and Codex to debug the path forward.
If a webhook failed or a permission was missing, I could break the problem into small checks:
- Is the provider configured?
- Is the webhook endpoint live?
- Did the database update?
- Is the report unlocked?
The engineering loop is much faster now. Shipping no longer feels like one giant wall. It feels like a pile of small, manageable problems.
However, the human work did not disappear. It just shifted.
AI can help you close the engineering loop. It can write code and fix bugs. But AI cannot replace product judgment.
The hardest part was not the backend. It was the frontend experience.
A clickable button is not enough. You need to build trust. You need to make sure the user understands why they should pay. You need to ensure the design matches the culture of the product.
I am still refining the UI. I want it to feel like a specialized tool, not a generic AI template.
The takeaway:
AI handles the integration. You handle the positioning, the trust, and the feeling.
How do you handle the final polish on your web products? Do you design first, or do you let the AI suggest directions?