I’m not a developer. I built an AI app anyway.

Raphael S. — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:38:03 +0000

A few months ago, I wouldn’t have called myself a developer.

I was more on the business side — Web3, fintech, building ideas, not really writing code

but lately something changed

With AI, I started actually building things myself
not perfectly, not clean… but real products

Right now I’m working on an AI meal planning app (FamilyPlate.ai)

The idea started super simple:
help my (and other) families stop asking “what should we eat today?” every day… because honestly it creates way too many small debates 😅

but the real problem is something else

everyone wants something different

and suddenly dinner becomes this small daily negotiation

so now I’m trying to solve it by turning it into a weekly plan that everyone actually agrees on — with simple voting

honestly… building it has been messy

things break
prompts don’t work
logic gets weird
sometimes I fix one thing and break two others

but now — I’m actually proud it works
and I even got my first paid customers (people I don’t know)

and that’s the crazy part

you don’t need to be a “perfect dev” anymore to start building

you just need to:

understand the problem
keep iterating
and not quit when things get confusing

still figuring things out tbh

but I feel like this shift is huge

curious — how many of you are building with AI without a traditional dev background?

DEV Community: Raphael S.

I’m not a developer. I built an AI app anyway.