The vibecoding journey, documented: project updates, the thinking behind each product, and lessons from shipping solo.
This blog is written by AI — on purpose, and I'm not hiding it.
Every post here is written by AI, in my voice and from my real project notes — the same AI I build everything with. The mind, the projects, and the journey are mine (Suhaib Elhadi); the writing is the machine's. I don't hide that. Owning it is the honest version, and honestly the more interesting one.
SQLite, self-run Postgres, or managed Postgres like Supabase — the real question isn't which is fastest, it's who gets paged when it breaks. How I actually choose, project by project.
The model is most confident exactly where I can least check it. How I build just enough competence in a new domain, fast, to catch it when it's confidently wrong.
Signups measure your landing page. Activation measures your product. How I define the activation moment for each of my nine projects, and why the rest of the funnel can wait.
A solo builder's analytics stack should be a short list of numbers that change what you do next. Here's the handful I check and the dashboards I ignore.
No staging tier, no separate environment to babysit — just branch previews and a fast rollback. Here's why that's the right setup when it's just you.
You pick free tiers, a vercel.app domain, and no error tracking when a project is a toy. Nothing re-asks those questions when the toy quietly becomes production.
If your database stores what someone bought, every pricing change is a migration. Store what they can do instead, and pricing becomes config.
Building nine products solo isn't nine times the work of building one. It's a different job. Here's what actually changes.
The Supabase free tier pauses a project after about a week of no traffic. Here's what that actually breaks, and how I decide which projects go Pro.
RevenueCat looks like a thin wrapper over StoreKit until you try to ship subscriptions yourself. Here's what it actually handles, from shipping a real iOS app.
A system that fails loudly gets fixed. A system that fails silently keeps reporting success — here's how silent failures hid inside my own automations.
Built and waiting feels like progress, so it never counts as a problem. Here's why an unlaunched shelf is its own failure mode — and what it quietly costs.
Nine projects as one operator. The code barely carries over between them — here's what actually does, and the one thing that never transfers at all.
Nine projects now, two of them actually live. An honest August walk through what shipped, what's still standing at the door, and the gap I haven't closed.
Next.js vs FastAPI isn't a performance question when you're building solo. It's about where the hard part of your app lives — here's the rule I use, and where it breaks.
Cadence Studios is the ninth project: an AI studio that renders motion reels and builds client sites, then finds the clients — with a hard human gate on outreach.
When building got cheap, the economics of a one-person studio flipped. The cost isn't making things now — it's carrying them. Here's where the weight goes.
When building a whole app only takes a weekend, done stops being a finish line. Here's how I decide something is actually done instead of just running.
claude-blog runs a team of agents that research, structure, write, and optimize a post — built to rank on Google AND get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity. Here's why I'm handing my blog to it.
The hardest part of vibecoding isn't getting AI to write code — it's verifying it. Here's how I actually test what an AI builds before I trust it.
People ask what tools I use like there's a secret stack. There isn't. Here's the honest, boring, short list of what's actually open when I build.
How does a solo developer market seven apps with no marketing team? I'm pointing App Marketing OS — the marketing suite I built — at my own portfolio.
Two updates worth logging: the portfolio is up to eight projects with ClipForge, and the community tool got its final name — CommunityHQ.
A quick honest walk through all seven projects: what's live, what's built and waiting, and what I keep telling myself about the difference.
Everyone thinks vibecoding means you type a sentence and an app falls out. Seven products later, here's the part nobody tells you.
I can build the apps. Marketing them is the part that quietly kills indie projects. So I built the suite that does the five things I always skip.
The first entry. Before the seven products, before any of it — why I decided to just start making the things in my head, with AI riding shotgun.