When Your AI Says It's Done

More of us are building software after work now. In a spare hour, at the kitchen table, with an AI writing most of the code. You describe what you want, it produces something, it tells you it's finished, and the little checkmarks turn green.

Here is the trap I fell into, and I have been doing this for years: "the build passed" and "this actually works for a real person" are two completely different claims. The AI can only see the first one. It cannot open your app on a phone and notice the button does nothing.

I learned this the hard way. I once shipped a screen full of settings that looked perfect and did nothing, because a piece of the page quietly replaced the part my code was talking to. Everything passed. Nothing worked. I only caught it by using the app like a stranger would.

So when your AI says it's done, don't take its word for it. Run this first:

Open the real thing, not the preview. Load the actual app, on an actual phone if that's where people will use it. The preview lies more than you'd think.

Do the boring path a real person does. Sign out, sign back in, tap it twice, hit back. Bugs live in the steps you'd never bother to test.

Try to break it on purpose. Leave a field blank. Type something silly. Drop your internet for a second. "Works when everything goes right" is not the same as works.

Check the thing you didn't change. New code has a way of quietly breaking old code two rooms over. Look at the screen next door.

Ask what it isn't telling you. "Done" usually means "done with the happy path." The edges are where your users actually live.

None of this requires you to be an engineer. It requires you to be a suspicious user for ten minutes. That is the whole skill.

The people shipping good things from their garages right now aren't the ones with the best prompts. They're the ones who stopped trusting "done" and started checking it. AI made building faster. It did not make verifying optional. If anything it moved that job squarely onto you, because you're now the only one in the room who can tell looks-finished from is-finished.

Build fast. Just don't confuse the green checkmark for a happy user.

I write Building in the Open about designing and shipping a real product in public, one honest week at a time.

Curious how solid your own build-with-AI process is? Take the 4-minute check → aneilrazvi.com/maturity.html