What actually breaks when you take an AI coding agent from demos to production — and what held up.
How I got here
I'm not an engineer. In January I was a business owner who couldn't write a line of code and didn't know what a database schema was. Six months later, the complete software stack of 12 small companies — multi-tenant ERPs handling live purchase orders and inventory, customer-facing SaaS products, PWAs running on shop-floor tablets, e-commerce sites — runs on software built and operated almost entirely through Claude Code.
This is not a "look how easy AI makes everything" post. The agent writes better code than I ever will. What it doesn't do — what nothing does for you — is build the habit of verification. Every painful incident I've had traces back to a check that nobody (me) thought to run. The agent is rarely the bottleneck; the absence of an audit habit is.
Here are the three lessons that cost me real production incidents, and the boring, repeatable procedures that now prevent them.
