Notes on building, shipping, and monetizing MVPs with AI coding agents.
Modern design separates the working surface from the reference surface. The header is for doing. The footer is for learning. Most MVPs get this backward.
Generic privacy policy templates miss most of what your product actually does. The good news: writing a tailored one for an MVP takes 30 minutes. Here's the structure.
Snapshot tests with no human review let broken layouts ship. Here's the pattern that combines automated browser drives with the agent literally looking at the screenshots.
You don't need a CMS. You don't need Retool. You need a private URL with the four numbers that tell you whether the product is working.
If your app lets users post anything other users see, you need content moderation. OpenAI's moderation endpoint is free, fast, and the easiest button to push. Here's how.
Compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. Here's the smallest legal surface that actually covers a beta launch — without spending $20,000 on a lawyer before you have your first user.
Accessibility sounds like weeks of work. For an MVP, it's about four hours. Here's the actual checklist that gets you to AA compliance and avoids the lawsuit.
If you're building your own card form, you've signed up for PCI-DSS compliance. Stripe Checkout puts that burden on Stripe. Here's how to wire it in 20 minutes.
Magic link auth removes passwords without rolling your own crypto. The Auth.js + Resend pattern is the cleanest path to a real signup flow that won't embarrass you on launch day.
Want a hello@yourdomain.com that forwards to your Gmail? Most providers charge $5–10/month. Here's the AWS pattern that costs zero and takes 30 minutes.
Buying a domain feels like the first step. It's not. It's a step you can defer for weeks without anyone noticing. Here's why founders should ship at *.vercel.app and what to do instead of agonizing over names.
Every founder I know has tried 'be careful' as a prompt. It doesn't work. The agent isn't ignoring you; it doesn't have a definition of careful. Here's what does work.
Nano is the workhorse for MVP-grade AI features. It's also the model people most often misuse. Here's what to use it for, what to avoid it for, and the cost math that makes it the right default.
Most MVPs don't fail because the code is bad. They fail because the founder doesn't know what 'done' looks like. Here's the checklist that defines done.
Most people host their static site on Vercel or Netlify, hit the limits, and start paying $20+/month. The S3 + CloudFront + Route 53 pattern costs about $0.50 forever. Here's the full setup.
I built the same things in both agents over the last three weeks. They're closer than most comparisons admit, and the differences that matter aren't the ones the marketing pages emphasize.
There are millions of people with product ideas and an AI agent on their laptop. Most never ship. Here's what's actually missing — and why we built a stack of skills to fix it.