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Dev Connect

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I shipped a product without being a "real" developer. Here is what that actually looks like.

I do not have a computer science degree. I write code with AI doing most of the typing. And I have a product in production with real users on it.

That sentence makes some people angry, so let me be precise about what it does and does not mean.

What it does not mean

It does not mean I do not understand what I ship. If you cannot read what the model wrote, you cannot tell when it is wrong, and it is wrong often enough that this matters. The failure mode is not bad syntax, the code usually runs. The failure mode is code that runs and does the wrong thing quietly.

It also does not mean it was fast. Building the thing was fast. Making it correct took much longer, and most of that time went into problems the model could not see: what should happen when two people do the same thing at once, what a stranger can read that they should not, what breaks when a table has ten thousand rows instead of ten.

What it does mean

The bottleneck moved. It used to be "can I write this". Now it is "do I know what should be written". That is a better bottleneck to have, and it is also a harder one to fake, because there is no model that will tell you what your product should be.

The skill that pays off is not prompting. It is reading a diff and asking why. Every time I skipped that step I paid for it within a week.

The part nobody warns you about

You will build something that works and then discover the hard part was never the building. Getting the first ten people to care is harder than any technical problem I hit, and no amount of tooling helps.

That is the honest version. If someone is selling you the story where AI makes you a founder in a weekend, they are selling you the easy half.

Why I am writing this

I run https://devconnectplatform.com, a place for people who build real products with AI. It is free, there is no advertising, and it is small. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What is there: a feed where people post what they are building, communities, developer jobs where the salary is on the listing, and a tester exchange for the Google Play closed-testing requirement.

If you are building this way too, I would rather hear what you are stuck on than pitch you anything.

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