I've been an emergency doctor in Serbia for 12 years, Emergency medicine is intense, and burnout is real. This summer I started building websites o...
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Thanks for the writeup
Thank you, Ben! It means a lot, especially coming from you. This community was exactly the right place to share it.
"what PHP is and how it differs from WordPress, what SQL and a database actually do" — that sequence is exactly what most CS curricula get backwards. you learned it from running code, not from slides. emergency medicine probably wired some of that: in a resus bay you learn by doing with feedback, not by reading a textbook first.
the phone constraint is the part i keep thinking about. no terminal, no local dev environment, everything through the ai conversation. that's vibe coding but with real domain knowledge injected at each step. did the ai ever give you something that felt medically wrong when you applied the same critical reading you'd give a drug interaction?
Thank you all for reading, commenting and reacting! 😁
I didn't expect over 300 readers. Some of you even visited the sites and left new messages on the wall. That made my week.
I learned something from every comment. See you in the next post.👾
The automatic confirmation email after payment is the contact path that usually gets skipped in AI-built launches. Even with payments off, if you keep a signup or message form, check the domain for MX / Null MX (timeout = unchecked) before treating that string as someone you can follow up with.
Thanks, Elijah! Good point. On one of the sites I already block disposable email domains, and two of them use a mail service that reports bounces. Checking for MX or Null MX before sending is a nice extra step, I'll keep it in mind.
Thanks, Kuga. That sounds like a sensible layered approach: block known disposable domains, then let the mail service's bounce handling catch what remains.
Tap versus drag is one of those bugs that never shows up with a mouse. You only find it by using the thing with your thumb, and building the whole thing on the phone meant you found it on day one.
First agree, then code took me a while to learn with AI too, even after nine years of writing code by hand. Every time I skip it I end up rebuilding the same screen again.
Thank you, Eusebiu! That's exactly how it happened. I'm on my phone all the time, so the bug showed up the moment I tried to open a card with my thumb. And it's reassuring to hear that "first agree, then code" isn't just a beginner's lesson. Nine years of experience and the same rule applies. 😄
This is so encouraging - three live sites in a month, on a phone!
One trick that saved me a lot as my sites grew: before asking the AI to build anything, I write the whole plan in a .md file and let the AI improve the plan until it stops finding things. Then it builds once. Far fewer "fix it again" loops - and on a phone that matters.
Congrats, and welcome to the builders.
Thank you, Michael, and thanks for the welcome! 🙏
That's a great trick, and it's close to what I ended up doing without planning it. For each site I keep a summary document with every decision we made, and I bring it into each new conversation so the AI doesn't start from zero. But I've never made the AI polish the plan until it stops finding things. That's the part I'm stealing. 😄
On a phone, every "fix it again" loop means downloading, uploading and testing all over again, so building once is worth a lot.